jgg

I still can't help but believe that, in practice the 'less radical' points I mentioned, like tense, mood and case (which I think would be switches, right?) arise differently in different contexts, if at all, owing to differences in cognition in various groups, and thus reinforces that mode of cognition in someone who learns the language.

The difference in morphology between, say, Ancient Greek and Modern English is pretty drastic, so what gives? In fact, I don't think English has ever been as morphologically-complex as Ancient Greek, and yet some hypothesize that they even descended from the same Indo-European language...if both languages start out from the same point, but evolve with a completely-different grammatical structure that makes different concepts explicit or notable, why would that happen in light of a true universal grammar that is inherent to everyone?

It's one thing to say that everyone at a certain intellectual level have a capacity to understand and use certain grammatical constructs, but to claim them as inherent to all people seems sketchy...

>The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system?

I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others.

>I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.

There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different?

I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course).

src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457

My opinion, as someone who is not important, is that most crypto software is bad, and most software that is fun to use has bad crypto. The Silent Circle stuff looks good, as does the Whisper Systems stuff, and I personally use Pidgin + OTR, which is crap from a UI standpoint.

I totally understand the design/UI motivations behind Cryptocat, but IMO Nadim needs to stick with a protocol design and crypto primitives that work, fix any flaws and then leave it alone until he's more comfortable (perhaps he's done that already).

That said, security issues are still security issues, and my tl;dr as someone no one on this site cares about is for Nadim to just stick with a set of crypto primitives and protocol design that work, fix the problems that arise and stay there until he's more confident in what he's doing.

I'm all for learning and experimentation, but not when some dude from Syria is literally Tweeting you and saying, "Hey, thanks!", which is the point of the article. I think end-point spying is probably bad enough at this point that we really don't need a broken protocol too. I don't really see the point in constantly changing out crypto primitives like he does, and it has introduced major security vulnerabilities in the past. He should find something, stick with it and then get it audited and reviewed, and then I think less people would bitch.

I support the goal of making crypto more usable.

I noticed it while getting a bunch of inappropriate 403 responses on basically any website, and my location kept showing up as "Ashburn, Virginia" automatically on weather sites.

Further, we have almost no power as a representative "democracy": the public can't recall a representative at all, for example, and it is only done by an internal chamber discussion (it has happened very few times in the history of the US).

Thus, we're really not supposed to "vote away" basic, sane axioms in the first place. The point of the US was to have those rights held firmly in place, and for its citizenry to use their right to bear arms to protect themselves against a government that tried to take them away. It's indicative of the US's culture at this point that stating this position (which is easily backed up by many of the founding fathers' writing) brands you as a "libertarian wingnut" or "on the fringe." Am I advocating violent revolt now? No, because most would not actually know what to revolt against (and probably don't perceive the corporate/government power structure in place in the US).

Then again, any attempt to do the aforementioned has failed in this country. A great example are the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed conveniently around the time of the French Revolution.

As a "reformed" psychopath, the article is all about him, his abilities and how he should be treated. Further, he claims that he sees "weakness", as if everyone he has or could have manipulated and screwed over was "weak" (instead of being someone who trusted him, which could theoretically be the same, but in practice most people would consider different), and he has just learned to control himself and not exercise his superior strength.

In reality, a psychopath is indirect, delusional and self-centred, and they will lie, subvert, cheat, steal and abuse to get their way, but rarely ever seek out true weakness in themselves (unless you count covering emotional vulnerabilities artificially) or make a stand for anything. For being a "strong" person obsessed with finding "weakness", you can pop the bubble of a psychopath simply by showing his network of followers and clingers exactly what he is...psychopaths are a strange mix of selfishness and deluding and changing themselves to fit in. They preach to others, put others down and castigate the flaws in others, but the second you put irrefutable evidence of the psychopath's incompetence, weakness or maliciousness in the open, in a way that everyone believes, he will have a meltdown and flip out. It's kind of like people who hang out on Internet forums, rise to the top of the ranks by spewing mindless platitudes and bullshit, who pretend to be rational while criticizing others mercilessly, and then when someone outs them as incompetent, malicious or even maybe just wrong, they throw a big fit and implode.

Finally, he talks about how his psychopathy gives him superior "strategic" abilities, but in reality, psychopathy actually limits long-term thinking and planning. They actually tend to be very impulsive, and one of the key tenets of psychopathy is a short-term, parasitic lifestyle.

He used the piece as a selfish exercise to bolster himself, paint his actual or potential victims as weak, and did it all with absolutely nothing based on reality, hence, I do not believe his is sincere.

The only point I wanted to make is that someone using a protocol (variant or original) that someone hasn't seen before is not inherently damning in and of itself. Mine was a general point, and yours is a practical one, which I mostly agree with.

The parent comment seems to imply that there is a pre-written solution for all cryptographic problems that can be dropped into place, and I also felt they were conflating high-level protocol problems with low-level cryptographic primitive problems (i.e., "rolling your own crypto" being used in a general sense). I think it is reasonable to compare two "non-standard" systems in that context, especially given how modifying an already-trusted protocol can go haywire if something is done wrong.

Whether or not an extension or protocol is reviewed, has a public spec, comes from a cryptographer, started from a more trustworthy protocol or has other practical elements that make it appear trustworthy on the surface, is another matter entirely. It 100% matters in practice, but not for a more general point.

I understand that Telegram is doing everything from the ground up and that TextSecure started with OTR, and that the ratcheting extension wasn't pulled out of thin air. I am not claiming in practice that Telegram and TextSecure are comparable (I did not mean to take anything away from TextSecure or the ratcheting scheme), and I personally would not touch Telegram in light of further snooping about and comments posted in this HN thread.

Colin's problem was that his (hand-written, from the looks of it) crypto primitives allowed him to use AES-CTR with a non-incrementing counter. I'm not sure if it's appropriate to say that in relation to a comment about "rolling your own protocol." I see that as a low-level problem.

Further, you've pulled a misdirection talking about TextSecure (which looks great, by the way). They don't roll their own crypto algorithms, but they have definitely tweaked and modified the OTR protocol for their own purposes in order to make it more secure. I'm left wondering why TextSecure is held up in contrast to someone who uses their "own" secure messaging protocol.

Whether or not this Telegram app is trustworthy (the lack of full source is suspicious), I have no idea. I would personally pick TextSecure over it.

I understood the article just fine! Did you? I don't care what his job is - he still lied! The internal logic of that piece is, "if he didn't deny it, people would think it was true!" The NSA was doing it anyway, so that makes fuck-all difference, now doesn't it?

Everything we have seen makes it clear that they are spying on Americans and they obviously know they are doing it. Clapper's answer was thus a LIE. He was asked a question and gave an answer he knew was wrong. HE LIED. THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF LYING.

I wish someone around here would ante up and starting banning the shills.

* even though Congress was lied to/mislead about the scope of the NSA's programs, by none other than the Director of National Intelligence [1]

* despite the fact that the NSA hastily rushed to justify an invasion of Syria with misleading data [2]

* despite the fact that the NSA helped produce evidence to justify the false invasion of Iraq [3]

* despite the fact that the NSA helps to subvert crypto software and backdoor services, which makes people and businesses less safe against electronic warfare (despite the fact that al-Qaeda is at least aware of the need for building their own crypto, even if what we've seen so far is possibly crippled by stupidity) [4] [5]

* even though the NSA were unable to catch the Boston bombers (even though the ФСБ warned the US multiple times about the brothers, they were tied to Chechnya, had jihadi content on their social media profiles and were already tied by association to a homicide) [6] [7] [8] [9]

* despite the testaments from former Intel folks that mass data collection doesn't work and that Gen. Keith Alexander is incompetent [10]

* despite Alexander being unable to come up with problems the NSA's mass surveillance has solved without lying [11]

* despite the fact that Alexander is a monumental douche who used taxpayer money to have a Hollywood set designer make his office into a re-creation of the Starship Enterprise [10]

...we should be "reassured to know how capable and thorough your cyber spy agency and military command are." We should rest assured that our electronic communications being scooped up and stored couldn't ever possibly be used for nefarious purposes against a citizen of the US, that it isn't a gross violation of a person's right to privacy and dignity and that even the majority of the NSA are kind-hearted people looking out for America's best interests in the big, scary world full of North Korea's and Muslim radicals and that my virgin, uninitiated mind just doesn't understand. This isn't all just a big, dumb, out-of-control bureaucratic freak-out or an attempt to instate a Stasi-esque intelligence regime.

Fuck you and your condescension, Loren. You are a coward and a liar, unless there is some grand plot the NSA has helped unravel, Clancy-style, that you just can't tell us about (I will apologize and retract my statements when it comes to light).

sources:

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/james-clapper_n_374... [2] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin [3] http://www.thenation.com/blog/174744/remember-when-nsa-surve... [4] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/05/nsa-subverts-most-encryptio... [5] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_se... [6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/russian-off... [7] http://www.thenation.com/article/174026/there-chechen-connec... [8] http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/20/us/brother-religious-language/ [9] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/23/nation/la-na-nn-bost... [10] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_... [11] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/15/1247400/-NSA-Direct...

Plus, the level that you'd need to reach for the kid to see something interesting as a result of math would require so much time and knowledge that you'd have been better off to just teach them fractions.

I don't mean to imply that the current software world is a cabal of highly-skilled geniuses who need preserving - it's not. From personal professional experience, it's, on average, a nuthouse of self-promoting Java idiots with a "dropout genius" mentality who have no common sense and are not nearly as smart or good at problem-solving as their blogs or resumes would lead you to believe.

However, I think it would another discussion entirely to ask if the wrong people feel confident enough to write code. The belief that we need to reach out and bring more people into programming, in a world where the average developer struggles to cobble together a web application that isn't full of basic security holes, is ridiculous.

Also, I strongly suspect all of these efforts to drag more people into coding are at least partly sponsored by industry, in an attempt to drive the relatively-high wage of a programmer down, in the face of a perceived increase in programmer demand.

That's like reading a scathing Yelp review of a dodgy restaurant and saying "he hates food!"

Your analogy is like doing meth in a bathtub with a small chimpanzee playing a xylophone to the tune of, "Pachelbel's Canon" while shoving a sharpened pencil into my urethra to wash away the pain of dealing with ridiculous comments on Hacker News.

Insert 3 credits and try again, dumbfuck.

* kicks back and waits for impending ban *

EDIT: Nice job editing your comment to remove the attack, you fucking dipshit.

Practical use ≠ commercial use! Also, I have no idea where you got the idea of "disgarding" research, especially in regards to pure mathematicians. What is "practical" to you?

Also, poststructuralist lit crit is not the be all and end all of "the humanities".

No, it's not, and yet when I deconstructed the author's paper (I crack me up), I found that he made a generalization about all of the humanities following his limited experience with the given topic.

My claim: influence of commercial world is extremely unimportant for most of the important parts of Field X, ergo, commercial influence has had almost no bearing on keeping Field X "useful", regardless of whether or not Field X is actually useful.

Statement to support claim: the vast majority of what we consider 'science' (lumped in with engineering by the author) consists of a theoretical backbone tested against reality, which has nothing to do directly with commercial interests in theory, and often in practice. Examples include mechanics, EM theory, quantum mechanics, relativity, genetics, number theory, integral calculus. You would have a hard time proving that these things, which all have a basis in reality, are that way because of "crass commercial necessity", as the author claimed.

I am saying that whether or not science and engineering are tied to reality has little to do with being relevant to the commercial world.