iamsohungry

> So politicians and intelligence services calling for encryption want, institutionally, to keep people safe. How can tech companies do that without breaking or backdooring encryption? That's the real problem to solve, and the first person to figure out how to do that will be way ahead.

I don't think this is a technical problem, and I don't think it's our responsibility to solve it.

If the US wants to stop terrorism they need to stop creating terrorists. The US created terrorists by starting economic wars, supporting violent dictators, creating economic that harm the common people and not the national leaders they purport to, providing conditional and earmarked aid that is sometimes actually harmful, and a wide variety of other internationally sociopathic behaviors. If we want to stop being attacked by people from other countries, we need to stop harming other countries.

But if we are talking about server code it could be written in a better language.

Because you might want Google to index your website.

Because you might want an integer or a float type.

Because you might want to be able to test the logic of your code on one environment, the only environment where it will be run.

Because you might want a reasonable dependency tree.

Because you might not want to rewrite portions of your code to run them on the server side.

I could go on.

A lot of these problems are mitigated by just keeping it simple. You don't, for example, need to design the templating language. Use an existing, successful language, and invert how it parses strings, and add a nicety for expressions. You can probably even reuse most of the parser, and then output code that runs by the language's eval. This gives you all of the language's constructs nearly for free. Python/Ruby/Lua/Elixir/Julia would be great for this. This also produces a better result: I can't tell you how maddening it is to not have basic language constructs in, say, Django templates, because the template designer decided to write a whole second much crappier language inside the language you're using. And this method will likely be more performant.

> The Attorney General of Texas Child Support website

It would not surprise me at all if this password hell was intentional.

Not trivially, no. Naive implementations in Haskell/F# are almost universally slower than naive implementations of the same algorithm in OCaml. In Haskell, this is partly due to lazy evaluation (which many production Haskell projects turn off) and in F# it's largely due to the baggage of interacting with the CLR (I have less knowledge about this, I'll admit).

I think it only makes sense to talk about naive, idiomatic implementations of an algorithm when you're talking about the performance of a language. If you start talking about highly optimized versions of algorithms, it's harder to make statements about which language is faster. People who use numpy adeptly get extraordinary performance in Python, but I don't think that makes the argument that Python is faster than OCaml; it's hard to say what an equivalent level of optimization in OCaml would look like.

I think you missed one of the most compelling things about OCaml: it's very arguably most performant system in existence which also provides the user with a strong type system. C/C++ provide performance but not a strong type system, which results in huge numbers of bugs. Other languages provide strong type systems, but in exchange give up a lot of performance. OCaml is somewhat unique in this combination of features.

I say "somewhat unique" because there are other languages in this space: Rust in particular may be the language of choice for these feature needs in the future.

This topic is, I think, most succinctly explained in Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong[1]. These concepts which rely on categories that you describe are wrong, but they're far less wrong than many other ideas. Don't forget that often science is used for prediction, and for prediction a good approximation is very useful. Yes, Tasmanian devils are a counterexample to the idea that cancers are never communicable, but it's an extremely rare counterexample. One can achieve great results in the study of cancers based on the assumption that cancers are never communicable.

[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Meh, I guess it's kind of neat, but if you're getting serious enough about photography that you need more magnification you should likely just get an actual camera.

I just don't understand why the responses to this post are all defending working remotely. Working remotely can be hard and still be the right thing for you. Getting defensive and downplaying all the problems with working remotely just means that we can't have a real discussion about how to solve those problems.

And what's more, it's creating a false dichotomy: there's no universal right answer to whether remote or in-person is better. Remote work is the best way for some teams. But it's certainly not the best way for any team I've been on, mostly because I'm far too extroverted to work on such a team.

If you don't have any choice in the people you work with and you can't find topics to discuss due to the strictness of conversational rules at your job, the problems at your workplace run far deeper than can be solved by going remote.

> If anything, we should, in a secular state, agree that people differ in their view of morality, and we should be tolerant of each other's needs, perceived or otherwise.

The problem is that some people's perceived needs are not compatible with other people's perceived needs. In order to decide which group gets their perceived needs, I think it makes sense to have a societal conversation about which of those perceived needs are actual needs, and which of those perceived needs are just wants.

I can't speak for seibelj, but I don't think you that telling people to stop being offended so easily amounts to telling disadvantaged groups to buck up and be quiet. Personally, I want people to start a conversation with me if I do something that hurts them. But I also have the basic expectation that people take the time to understand and consider what I am saying before they get offended.

I also don't think that "I reject your understanding of your experience, so your perspective is invalid" is an unreasonable thing to say. Sometimes people don't understand their experiences, and as a result, they misjudge the nature of reality.

The recent controversy at Yale over cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes is a good example: there were students saying that they couldn't go to class because they didn't feel safe after a professor made an argument that avoidance of cultural appropriation had to be balanced with free speech. I do reject that understanding of their experience; they experienced nothing that indicated they should feel unsafe. Nothing about the professor's measured statement of disagreement indicates danger. Their perspective on that topic was invalid.

People's feelings aren't always valid; everyone is wrong some portion of the time. And that's true of disadvantaged people, too. If we accept the rule that every opinion from an underprivileged person is correct, we're opening ourselves to all sorts of wrong ideas. And if we discard all dissenting opinions from privileged people, we're closing ourselves to all sorts of correct ideas. Truth is not solely given to the disadvantaged.

I'm not sure I see the causal relationship here. Why does increased competition mean that people are not publishing?

I think the problem is that the metrics which academics are competing to maximize are poor. If your metric is "How much interesting science has this person published?" you're going to get very different results from "How much accurate science has this person published?" Reducing competition doesn't change which question is being asked, it just reduces the importance of any metric at all. It seems likely to me that removing competition would give no incentive to publish anything measurable at all; after all, why publish if your career isn't connected to it?

Obviously some would publish for intrinsic reasons, and it's possible that stress levels due to competition are leading to shoddy work, but none of this amounts to an argument that less competition would lead to people publishing negative results.

It's a partial solution, not in the sense that it improves anything by itself, but in the sense that combined with getting other countries to stop sharing data with the US, it would prevent Europeans from being spied on by the US.

Another interesting example is Stuart Gulliver, CEO of HSBC when they were fined 5 weeks of income for laundering money for Mexican and Columbian drug cartels. HSBC lawyers persuaded prosecutors "not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system." Gulliver was not tried for any crime after helping launder money for literal mass-murdering drug lords in a country where people are jailed for possession of marijuana. Given the dynamics of the situation, it's troubling that he was able to do that.

[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-se...

[2] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/hsbc-said-to-near-1-9...

> Mainly because it's not as interesting. For every positive result researchers find there are dozens of things they test that just don't work.

That seems to be the core of the problem. Reality doesn't have a bias toward results that are interesting, humans do.

> Imagine if the first test of "romantic priming" didn't work. Would the researchers really bother trying to publish "Hypothesised romantic priming effect was just a wild hunch after all."? And would the journal accept it? No way.

So maybe they should.

That would likely be completely counterproductive. There's no such thing as a separate neutral group of practitioners. More likely what will happen is it will have a chilling effect on what science gets done. The Kinsey studies, for example, got as far as they did largely because they were under the radar for a long time. Imagine if, instead, Kinsey sent his study design off to a "separate neutral group of practitioners". They would likely have exposed the nature of the study and Kinsey would likely have been fired.

I don't entirely understand why the pressure to publish at all costs is the issue here. The article says:

> This particular plot is a statistical smoking gun, and suggests that the positive results from the original studies (black dots) were probably the result of p-hacking. They were chance findings, selectively published because they were positive.

From that, it seems to me like the problem isn't what the researchers published, it's what they didn't publish.

I'm a programmer, not a researcher, but in college chemistry we had marble notebooks that we wrote everything down in. The notebooks made it obvious if a page was torn out, everything had to be written in pen, and if we crossed something out, we had to cross it out in such a way that it was still legible. If we didn't include data in our results, we were expected to explain why. The most valuable thing I learned in those classes was the importance and practice of auditability.

I doubt that my classes were unique in this respect and I wonder if this might be the solution to the problem. I've long been a proponent of people simply publishing literally all their data now that internet hosting is so cheap, and only publishing syntheses of the data in journals, giving anyone the opportunity to verify the author's conclusions. Psychology is different due to the need for confidentiality for the people being studied, but the full data should be available to at least the peer reviewers before a study can be published.

EDIT: To add to this, elsewhere on this thread there's a lot of discussion about people not publishing negative results because they're not interesting. But reality doesn't have a bias towards results that are interesting, only humans do. I don't know how to solve this problem, but at least making publication of your non-interesting results a condition of publishing your interesting results would be a start.

> Data hosted in Germany won't be accessible to Microsoft US nor the US government.

How do we know? Is Microsoft planning to release the source code?

> If the German government can access that data so what? Do you really expect to escape from that?

Yes.

I agree with your general point that this is a step forward, but I am also wary that people will perceive this as solving the massive problems we have with securing ourselves from pervasive surveillance.

Keep in mind this is basically just a promise from Microsoft that they'll keep your data in your country, so it's only as good as Microsoft's willingness and ability to keep that promise. If you trust it it's a step forward, but Microsoft is far from being worthy of that trust, so it's a very small step forward, so small it's barely worth talking about.

> Only if there is a Safe Harbor II coming where the US guarantees to not spy on data without warrant/open procedure and legal recourse by EU citizens.

That guarantee would be completely unbelievable at this point.

> I know this EUGH ruling does not make sense with UK and France having the same intransparent all-people are spyed on.

The EUGH ruling makes perfect sense, it's just a partial solution instead of a complete one.

Given the US is believed to be the most powerful of the bad actors (i.e., they NSA have the most backdoors and other capabilities) removing them from the system is not an insignificant step. Shutting out UK and France as bad actors will be more complicated.

You're correct that doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life, but I don't think stress and mental illness are particularly good examples of this.

A better example might be African countries where increased income has not led to better access to healthcare, but has instead fed a growing market for fake HIV/AIDS medications.

> Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical)

This is a legitimate criticism of NGOs, but it's also one of the ways in which capitalism is counterproductive to reducing poverty. Many of the cases in which aid spending is misused result from corporate interests determining where the money is spent instead of the people who need aid. An ongoing example of this is the milk lobby pushing for milk in food drops in areas where nearly everyone is genetically lactose-intolerant, or water aid going to buy Coca Cola's bottled water instead of building sustainable water utilities and infrastructure. One of the reasons I left the NGO I worked at was that I felt they didn't do a good job of decoupling the aid programs they supported from corporate interests.

> where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?

Governments, who in turn get it from taxpayers. The exact system that free market capitalists rail against. And if capitalist corporations didn't evade taxes so deftly, maybe I'd have obtained more. Certainly democratic-socialist governments give more aid per-capita than more capitalistic ones.

Instead of asking leading questions as if they proved your point, why don't you try actually making an argument? Yes, much of the revenue I've obtained is indirectly generated within a capitalist system. But if you want to argue that capitalism produces more aid than the alternatives would, that's ridiculous.

> http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/fullreport.pdf

Ugh. Don't post things that you haven't read as if they proved your point. You'll find that the word "capitalism" is used 3 times in that PDF. Let's grab those paragraphs, shall we?

"Privatization has been a major part of Mongolia’s transition to capitalism. Its move to a market economy has been accompanied by increases in poverty and income inequality. More than 10 years after it began its transition, Mongolia remains one of the poorest countries in the world."

This being an example cutout within the following quote:

"After reviewing the distributional impact of privatization activities involving utilities in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America, Bayliss (2002) concluded that privatization had demonstrably harmed the poor, either through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services, as the result of private firms’ principal concern with profits, prices and costs. At the same time, weak governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries led to poor control of market abuses by private utility companies."

The next two usages of the word capitalism is in the bibliography:

"de Soto, Hernando (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books."

"Robbins, Richard H. (1999). Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, chap. 5 (“The problem of population growth”), pp. 147-178."

I'm not sure how the second citation feels about capitalism, but the first one certainly isn't positive.

So no, your link doesn't say much about capitalism, and what it does say is that capitalism is not pulling people out of poverty; on the contrary, it sounds like that document thinks capitalism is causing some poverty.

Why are you crediting this to capitalism?

Having worked in a nonprofit that works on obtaining foreign aid, it's my opinion that these improvements have occurred despite capitalism due to the hard work of people like me, not because of capitalism.

> Wages lag production so debt is required.

An alternative would be for wages to not lag production, and for the ultra-rich to make less money.

> This is what you want to happen.

Uh, no, I don't want my dependencies to break out from under me, thanks.

This is a major problem with the JS culture that I cannot stand. Too many JS devs can't be bothered to write software that doesn't suck, and so they try to instead tell their users their crappy problems are actually what they want. No, if you push changes to a library that break your library users' software without warning and a reasonable upgrade plan, you're doing a bad job.

> The alternative is, you shrinkwrap everything and lock it down, and your dependencies never change.

Or I use dependencies that upgrade their dependencies intentionally instead of whenever the `^` does it for them. The problem is that most of the JS packages out there are garbage software that doesn't do that. So it's necessary to be careful and only use dependencies which are well-maintained and reliable. ...which isn't unique to npm or a new problem, it's been well-known since all the way back when CPAN was new. Just because installing libraries is easy doesn't mean it's a good idea.

> Except that now it's been a year, and you want to update your dependencies, and it's this huge jump that requires so many changes that it's going to take a month of concentrated pain to do, so you never do it, and welcome to the world of legacy code.

Or you can do your job like a competent professional and don't wait a year to upgrade your dependencies. Again, fewer, more reliable dependencies helps with this; if you are using reasonable dependencies, they'll push few breaking changes and give warnings and reasonable upgrade plans.

God, "unicorn" is already stupid enough.

> Not if the ad scripts are mixed in with the content-rendering scripts, in which case you'll need to do some on-the-fly modifying of scripts.

This is true, but it's not problem unique to WASM. In fact, your proposed pattern matching AdBlocker seems like it would be much easier to produce targeting WASM.

It's also worth nothing what an edge case this is. Some sites might do this, but large enough sites to be worth doing this will likely be large enough to inspire site-specific workarounds. Smaller sites will be unlikely to couple their ads to their rendering so tightly.

> and I fear it will introduce the Halting Problem in to a lot more areas.

This is the part of your post where I concluded that you were deeply confused and stopped reading. The didactic part of me wants to teach you what the halting problem is, but I'm not even sure what it is you don't know at this point.