int_handler

If anyone wants to read more information about Justina Pelletier, the patient at BCH that the author DoS'ed the hospital donations website over, here are a few articles you might find interesting:

* Parents of Justina Pelletier sue Boston Children’s Hospital: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/25/parents-justina...

* The Case of Justina Pelletier Still Requires Nuance: http://www.harpocratesspeaks.com/2016/03/Case-of-Justina-Pel...

* The New Child Abuse Panic: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/the-new-chi...

Where exactly does the author describe himself as "the next Aaron Swartz?" The only comparison I found was that the article draws parallels between Gottesfeld's and Swartz's cases since both are being prosecuted by Carmen Ortiz and the article is claiming similar to Swartz, the prosecutors are again abusing the CFAA and trying to "make an example of" Gottesfeld.

    Why this society and these millennials believe they are entitled only to good things, positive experience and rosy road ahead?

Of course, only millennials care about improving workplace conditions, and all millennials are whiny entitled crybabies.

/s

Yes, we should just leave all problems that we face as is and put absolutely no effort into solving them and improving our well-being.

Why is it not possible to just use the system font for these UI elements?

Interesting. Thanks!

Does SpaceX have any concerns about the Kessler Syndrome [0] or any plans to mitigate it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

By definition, that is not neutral.

    The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion.

[citation needed]

Technically, they are't really OS X's shitty versions of Linux utilities but rather the BSD versions of GNU utilities.

While I agree that given the information from the Inspector General's report, 18F certainly needs to be more disciplined about how it spends its resources, do you really think that 18F is the most egregious example of a government agency fucking around and wasting money? How about the DoD's $8.5 trillion of unaccounted taxpayer money [0]?

[0] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccou...

While I completely agree with you that spending $4,000 on these slack bots is a waste of time, that is still a minute fraction of the cost of "unbillable" items listed by this article. Why not submit an FOIA request on one of the other items instead, such as the $140k spend on "developing the brand" and find out what actually involved? [0]

If you really want to be outraged by a waste of taxpayer dollars, I would recommend that you take a look at how much state governments are overspending on prisons vs education [1], wasteful spending in defense [2], and the $8.5 trillion in unaccounted taxpayer dollars spent on defense [3].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793035

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/01/pf/college/higher-education-...

[2] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/29/where-did-us-taxp...

[3] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccou...

I am not affiliated with 18F but do work for a major tech company. I am not convinced that the consulting model is better for the kinds of projects that 18F is trying to undertake, such as developing the web services for government agencies.

Most tech companies invest in things such as culture, internal productivity tools, and developer and testing infrastructure that are not deliverables to clients and thus not billable. While these may incur a higher start-up cost, these are critical for ensuring long-term productivity.

Correct me if I am wrong but my impression is that the consulting world is much more concerned with delivering and then moving onto the next project, with very little shared work or infrastructure between projects.

I'm sure 18F has areas of improvement for how it spends its resources and how it tracks costs and billing. Every organization does. However, I would not be surprised if the reason 18F exists is that the government found that outsourcing this work to consultants led to higher costs and lower quality deliverables compared to products being released by tech companies and thus wanted to try a different approach.

    The 10-month investigation by the GSA's inspector general 
    found that 52 percent of 18F's work was unbillable and 
    included an internal project to change its logo by altering 
    its font, alignment and background color. In all, 727 staff 
    hours, or $140,104, were spent on developing the brand, 
    including that logo change.

It seems that the author is intentionally obfuscating this point and making it seem as if 52% of 18F's work was put towards "making the logos look hipper," which is likely not the case. While "developing the brand" includes logo work, in most cases, that is just a small part of it. Developing a UI design spec, similar to Google's Material Spec [0], would also fall under "developing the brand."

Perhaps someone from 18F can speak to whether developing the U.S. Web Design Standards [1] is part of this category because if so, I would argue that spending $140k (which is roughly 1-2 software engineer annual salaries) on such a project is certainly worthwhile since this spec is part of the foundation for many future projects.

[0] https://design.google.com/spec

[1] https://standards.usa.gov/

Agreed. Many of the "unbillable" work items listed in the article seem to be establishing important procedures and tools to improve productivity and a positive work environment, which most tech companies do as well.

Makes you wonder whether the author and the poster are affiliated with one of those old-school government consulting or contractor companies that would gladly see 18F disappear so that the government would outsource the work instead.

Seems that most of Baidu's C++ open source projects have this pattern as well, albeit with minor variations on the Google C++ style such as 4 spaces for indentation.

Are these conceptually/semantically different from master/worker?

Is this really a phenomenon that is exclusive to Bay Area companies though?

Protocol Buffers is not proprietary. It is open source under the BSD license. Here is the source code: github.com/google/protobuf. It is very much an open protocol, and anyone is free to write their own implementation of it. It is just a standards-based protocol.

If your organization values the existence of a standard over technical excellence, then there is no use in convincing you. Otherwise, in terms of ease of use, performance, tooling, and human readability and writability, Protocol Buffers is superior to XML-based protocols (since the API for converting between the binary and text formats is extremely simple to use).

As a fun fact, if you really wanted to use XML as a wire format, you could even write an XmlFormat ser/de for Protocol Buffers, similar to the JsonFormat that is already provided, but then it would defeat one of the main purposes of using Protocol Buffers in the first place because you would replace an extremely performant wire format with an extremely sub-optimal one.

You can use Protocol Buffers for configs without having to serialize them in its binary format. Protocol Buffers has always had its own text format [0] and now a JSON mapping [1] as well.

The proto text format is actually more flexible and less verbose than JSON since it does not require the outer enclosing set of braces and quotes around all the keys and has support for comments.

Here are a couple of examples of config files using the Protocol Buffers text format:

* Bazel CROSSTOOL: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/master/tools/cpp/CR...

* SyntaxNet: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/syntaxnet/s...

[0] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview...

[1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j...

My impression is that the reason why XML is so well-regarded in the enterprise is because these companies are not aware of better alternatives, such as Protocol Buffers [1]. The reason why XML has a bad reputation outside of the enterprise is because it is so incredibly verbose (both the language itself and the code used for working with it), and that all-in-all, it is a sub-optimal solution to a solved problem.

To illustrate: Protocol Buffers' wire format is much more compact. It removes the complexity of having to deal with XML parsers by providing classes generated from the message definition/schema. You can use it with GRPC to implement your service APIs. It is supported for many different languages, including Java and C#. It now even has a JSON mapping [2]. Overall, Protocol Buffers can do everything XML can do as both an exchange format and as a configuration language but better.

[1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

[2] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j...

I'm sure you will also love JSONx: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.5.0/com....

There are plenty, especially in the Java and .NET worlds. To name a few:

* Ant/Ivy * Maven * MSBuild * NuGet package configs

I don't think that is the exact intention of this article. It could very well be that the author knows that law is interpreted by humans and does not function like a computer. The purpose of the article is to present a fresh interpretation of the law taking into account advancements in technology, of which many people in our judicial system lack sufficient understanding.

> Long lines of text can be hard to parse, and thus hard to read. Setting a limit of characters per line greatly enhances the readability and appeal of a wall of text.

I agree with this 100%.

What I don't understand is why many developers argue that this principle does not apply to code and that we shouldn't have line length limits "because it's not 1970 and we have large monitors." If long lines of prose is difficult to parse, then long lines of code are even more cumbersome to parse, especially when you are either 1) slowed down by having to scroll horizontally all the time or 2) distracted by the awkward naive line wrapping done by the editor.

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

I am replying to your other comment here since it is not possible to reply to that comment for some reason.

I do not think that is a valid comparison. The author did not go out of her way to point out that the server was located in China. There is no mention of China in the title, and the only place where the author mentions China is several paragraphs in explaining how and where the data is transmitted. There are more mentions of China in this comment than in the entire article.

Finally, for the record, I do not have a verified email associated with this account and thus do not have the ability to downvote.

That part, I agree with.

How is it coerced? The author reports the facts exactly as they are.

If the author had instead attempted to tie this to, say, past security breaches caused by hackers operating out of China, then that would be framing the situation in a coerced way.

I think it is highly debatable whether this is a potential dogwhistle. The author explained the facts are they are:

> But if you’re not home, your phone sends the command to a server in China, which then passes the command along to the socket.

> The result is that the unique network ID of your socket is transported in an unencrypted form to the Chinese server — and anyone who gets their hands on the ID can then control the socket.

The problem with tying this to the other security breaches caused by Chinese hackers would actually make this article _more_ sensationalist because that would allege that this company is somehow affiliated with the hacking activity.

If the company and server were located in other countries other than the US, it is highly likely that the author would specify the country as well.