martinced

Instead of France trying to reimburse its own public state debt they decided to move to 35 hours / week.

We can see the results now: Germany's economy is one of the best in the eurozone, they managed to stay at "only" 80% of public debt and are enjoying a modest GDP growth. Meanwhile France reached 100% public debt and is dangerously close to a disaster (youth unemployment is rising, the private sector isn't motivated anymore, austerity will need to kick in or France won't be able to re-finance itself on the markets).

The loss of competitivity of France is directly attributed to moving to 35 hours / week and is going to be the main reason why France is going to lose its status as the world's fifth biggest power. By 2017 Brazil's going to be in front of France. Heck, if Holland and the socialist gets re-elected there's a far from zero probability that France won't be part of the G8 anymore by 2022!

That is very concerning but, sadly, there's nothing else to hope from socialists who are spreading hatred of the entrepreneurial spirit and hatred of those who succeeded, in the name of the nanny state spraying loyal socialist voters with money inflating their sense of entitlement.

And, more importantly, it was so easy to follow a gigantic amount of threads and find the information that would likely be of interest to you.

Sure this required good readers and users willing to learn to use these but as a result it was incredibly more useful than what we have today. There were some people who simply geniuses and who were explaining things in great way: it was very easy to assign them good scores so that their interventions would stand out.

What do we have today? Inferior crap like StackOverflow because, supposedly, users would be too lazy to learn to use powerful functionalities.

I'm pretty sure one day we'll get some "Gnus meet StackOverflow" webapp which is going to rock our world. I can't wait for the next big thing because honestly we've made a gigantic step backward.

Actually zdnet is a pro-MS propaganda medium.

Who does seriously take this junk seriously?

There may a lot to criticize about Google's move regarding RSS but posting links to zdnet isn't helping the cause.

Well: it was already able to perform partial line coverage, so the 66%/100% example given in TFA is totally bogus.

The entire industry is based on a business model which only a monkey could fuck up, yet the industry manages to fuck it up (as Taleb writes).

You do realize that all these risk computation are totally bogus and led to big trouble in 2008 right?

And that there's no risk because when the shit hit the fan bankster simply go say they're too big too fail and get bailed out.

And at that point they're effectively on life support and, still as Taleb is saying it, they should shut the fuck up.

Don't talk about risk when the only risk is being bailed out by public money once you, of course, miscomputed the risk.

Wanna talk about all the banks in the eurozone that needed a bail out in the recent years since Greece defaulted because they didn't correctly analyze the Greece state default risk?

Hint: it's far from over and far more fucked up than most people think and more banks will be bailed out again with public money (starting with Cyprus right now).

Yet in 1999 economists did warn about precisely that: about the euro that would lead to both Spain and Greece doing state default. Who listened?

Where in the financial world did anyone listen to that and take that risk into account? Nowhere.

Nobody.

Because public money is always here to bail out.

So please stop telling us there's risk. It's all a freakin' broken model and the entire financial system ain't there to provide liquidity anymore: it's become something out of control trying to shift as much money around as possible in order to generate as much "rake" as possible.

And if these monkeys didn't even correctly manage the risk on something as essential as state debt, when having all the information available to correctly compute such a risk (including warning from economists that defaults would be coming), what makes you think they'd be able to compute the risk on more complicated products, like CDS and all the crazy stuff that this industry simply makes up in order to take a bigger rake on all the money shifted around?

It's a bunch of quants who've lost it: they're out of touch with the real world and can't understand something as basic as the inevitability of a state defaulting when facing the facts.

And you're trying to tell us that they know what taking risk is?

Risk is entrepreneurs putting their personal belongings on the line. Not a bunch of sick gamblers using broken models to try to generate more and more money with the public money that is keeping their employers alive.

"The black swan" is a pretty good book. Of course it's not "nice" towards people like you. Sadly he was right and predicted correctly what would happen, contrarily to all the supposedly "risk takers" you seem to be so fond of because they'd be taking such amazing risks.

Is this RNG written in Lisp!?

Sorry, couldn't resist ; ) (big fan of Clojure and elisp here btw)

Me too because hypocrisy is clearly a form of intellectual dishonesty in itself and I don't want to lose time with intellectually dishonest people. As simple as that.

If someone I know is a torturer and doesn't know I know it and tells me: "torturing people is bad", I'm not going to argue with him. I'm not going to think: "his point may be wrong because he's intellectually dishonest so torturing may actually be acceptable".

No, actually I'd disrespect this person even more: a first time because he's a torturer and a second time because of his hypocrisy.

I've got zero things to learn from such person, no matter how true or wrong their poisonous words are.

There are way enough knowledgable and honest people out there to learn things from.

Please do continue to use it.

F^ck hypocrites.

The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever.

What about we stop it?

I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too.

Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something.

It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.

Now on Cappucino's website I read this:

"Cappuccino is an open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like the desktop software users are familiar with."

and I can't help but think this is all wrong. There are many (most ?) users who are now familiar with webapps, not desktop apps. And what they want is definitely not a webapp looking like an old, outdated, Windows or Java / Swing app (which is exactly how Cappucino looks like).

What many user wants is webapps that look like webapps and if they are "forced" to use a desktop app, then they want a desktop app looking like a webapp (I'm thinking about the client-side desktop apps embedding a browser + JavaScript engine).

I'm also pretty sure that devs who have done both advanced HTML + CSS to "customize" the UI of their app do much prefer that over, say, the total and utter madness that Swing is (I'm speaking of what I know).

Yes, HTML and CSS have their warts... But you'd have to a masochist to want to create a desktop app using Swing.

Users I'm sure they don't want apps that looks like desktop apps: they now have browsers, iPad, Android tablets, etc. They hardly remember what an old Windows desktop app was like.

Devs I don't know: I've done my fair share of Swing and the last thing I want is go back doing that.

I kinda like this "simple / straight to the point" webapp worlds that we have right now.

Seriously: being on your high horses and all is fine and well but your article is an oversimplification as to how the web works and as to what devs need and want.

For example lately I've been very interested in flapjax (FRP UI) and webfui (Clojure / ClojureScript with automated synchronization between the client and the server).

Functional programming and FRP UI may be the way forward. I'm not saying it is but I'm saying it may. What does Cappunico have to offer from the standpoint of determinism and reproducibility? Seen from a sufficiently distant paradigm, any web framework is the old, broken, inneficient way of doing things. Even your beloved Cappunico which you wasted so many time on.

Cappunico is a failure. It doesn't have to do with you being too intelligent and having figured out things earlier than others. It's just that there are many who devs do not want Objective-C / JavaScript and who want instead something really disruptive. As long as the one really disruptive thing doesn't come along, there shall be competition between lesser solutions (which Cappucino being one) Deal with it.

But you do realize it does definitely create another, much more serious, security problems right? What happens when the single sign-on server gets compromised? What happens when tokens aren't as secure as they should (like the recent OAuth SNAFUs, with an 's')? What happens when you don't pay attention to all the fineprints in the Persona docs stating things like:

"Be careful if you don't do this it's going to be easy to forge"

and:

"Guidelines to use Persona securely"

?

So it can be used not securely? Like OAuth? Do you think I find it re-assuring that I have to take steps so that things are not easy to forge? What when the latest JavaScript / browser exploits manages to forge requests?

Don't get me wrong: this seems very convenient. But you're trading time for something here. It saves you time by now having to roll your own security correctly (a DB into which you put emails and bcrypt encrypted passwords) but it comes at a price.

The price is the added insecurity that single sign-on adds.

Schneier wrote a long time that anything too complex cannot ever be secure. That's the case of OAuth and of many federated/unique/single sign-on logins.

The biggest problem has actually nothing to do with social: the problem is security of all these single-sign on / unique ID.

We're in 2013 and hardly a day goes by without a major security exploit found affecting Rails, Java, OAuth, Flash, etc. There are so many botnets out there that sites we rely upon for our daily workflow are getting taken down (GitHub)...

Yet people don't talk about security. They don't even mention it. Not in the TFA. Not in this thread (besides two insightful comments).

As long as people will keep thinking that they can put all their eggs in one basket online and "really really have this basket by hyper-secure" we're gonna be in big trouble.

It doesn't help that several people on HN are selling snake-oils products "put all your passwords in this unbreakable app, we guarantee you nothing bad could ever happen".

If you're stupidly using your email as your username then your email becomes public should the site you're on show, at any point, your username.

Which is why sites correctly done use the email for login but display a username and never your email. Correctly done sites also forbid username from containing '@', so that you can be sure that people don't do anything retardedly stupid like using their email as username, which would be displayed publicly on the site...

I'm also sure that people are working hard to fix these recent security issues and perfs issues.

But as a non-Rails dev I can tell you one thing: with all the attention that Rails got lately I'm sure I'll never be learning Ruby / Rails.

I'm into Clojure right now. Next target is Go.

Sadly all these Rails exploits do have a negative effect for Rails: I'm not saying this to criticize Rails. I'm saying this because I'm honestly 100% sure I'll never ever be doing anything serious with Rails and I know I'm not the only one in this case.

So, Rails devs, fix this and fix this rather sooner than later because every exploit is missed opportunities.

I see this a lot on HN too: people who've experience some level of success (as pg would say the first thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many levels of rich : ) and who hence think they know it all about everything and can constantly try to diminish others.

There's a lot of negativity here but, thankfully, there are also others who are here to share, educate and learn.

I really hate that: on a lot of sites videos plays just fine on Chromium / Linux without Flash.

How hard is it to create a website which serves videos in several formats depending on the client?

The Ultima series had that ability to transport you into these universes (or this universe) that Lord British (aka Richard Garriott) created.

When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an Ultima.

I played III, IV and V like crazy. The Commodore Amiga port of Ultima V really sucked. I was so sad that I paid for that crap. So what did I do? I went back to the Commodore 64 to be able to play Ultima V.

Yes, you read correctly: dodging the Amiga which has a way superior machine than the C64 (they're not even comparable feature-wise, these are two different eras of computers) to go back to an old C64 to spend countless hours / days playing Ultima V.

The crappy graphics didn't matter: it was all about the experience.

The only game which did something similar to me is FTL's "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". FTL then made Dungeon Master which is considered to be one of the most influencial game ever.

Lord British is full of it? Yes. Totally deserved. There are no two game designers like him on this planet.

Since I moved to GMail I don't know what spam is anymore: everytime people complain about spam I'm confuzzabled because I honestly thought the issue was solved.

It's great to run your own mailserver and be independant of the evil Google etc. but face the facts: people on GMail hardly get spam anymore...

Now as to how to fight spammers I'd suggest building a gigantic botnet, taking control of hundreds of thousands of credit cards numbers and ordering like mad from these spammers. Make it so big that credit cards companies start noticing the issue.

This of course should be done by someone who doesn't care about petty money...

Especially the '"emperor has not clothes" random splotches' part ; )

There are however great differences between gold and diamonds: liquidity of the market and buy/sell price. As TFA points out you're getting scammed everytime you buy a diamond and you're getting super-scammed everytime you buy one. Not so much with gold: you buy gold at price X, you sell it 6 months later when it took 3%, you're still making a benefit (even with the margin taken by the professional vendor / buyer). With diamond if you buy one at $2000 you're lucky to be able to sell it at $600.

The other difference is can we can synthetize diamonds now. Gold not so much: the only way we know how to create synthetic gold is to start from an even rarer metal (which is hence guaranteed to be always more expensive than gold).

Unless a major discovery in physics --so important that the world as we know it would profoundly change-- we can't create gold.

If suddenly we could synthetize gold from a lower-grade metal, it means we could also synthetize silver and then copper etc. The implication in various industries would be more than major: it would be a revolution.

Now my great-grandmother gave me a nice, never mounted, one-carat diamond that I've tested and that is true: it got hidden in Europe during WWII so that the nazis wouldn't confiscate it. I love it because I know it's a real one (tested) and I know it's history. So it's "sentimental" and one day my SO shall wear it and one day my daughter... And then my daughter's daughter.

If all goes well ; )

I don't care much that it would take me anywhere from $5k to $12k to buy one. I know that if I were to sell it I wouldn't make anywhere near as that and I'd regret it anyway.

Why be so harsh with him?

A lot of sales people are utter jerks praying on stupid person: my mom is getting old and a bit losing it and recently she bought some totally unnecessary and shitty tool after seeing an "infomercial" on TV.

Do I need to love these sales people in that infomercial?

Certainly not. There are great products out there aimed at smart people which you can sale too by taking care of them and their needs and without trying to mindtrick them.

For example JetBrains managed to sell me a license of IntelliJ 12 at 75% off on Doomsday back in december.

Did they need to have a cold skin after many people insulted them for shoddy sale practices? Did they need to spam my email?

I don't think so. So your overgeneralization as if there was one type of sales person is wrong.

There's not just one way of selling things and salesperson are certainly not part of every succesful online business. There are many microISVs who have a perfectly nicely running business who don't have the singlest skill needed to be an used car salesman...

Exactly... And the very fact that even people don't see anything wrong with "autonomous cars", probably "because this time the company in charge is going to create a separate network whis is really secure" is precisely part of the problem.

We live in a world were people who are supposed to be smart enough to program all these machines and set up all these infrastructure are thinking: "Nothing can ever go wrong with this".

As a result we have more and more insecurity and the problem is only going to get worse.

And I've got a bridge to sell to people who think that autonomous are never going to get hacked...

I mean is SQL something inherently so secure that all webapp devs should use?

If you're not a DB expert, what would be your rationale for using SQL instead of other alternatives?

It's not like if every website out there was using SQL. Heck, not even all sites are using OO languages.

So while I agree that an ORM is nice if you're stuck that particular Java/C# + SQL hell I fail to see how exactly OP did imply that he recommended objects and SQL...

He said ORM sucked. Not that he was using "objects" and SQL...

Seen that Datomic can be backed by many different types of storage, including SQL DBs, this sounds like a very weird question... I mean: if you want SQL, just use SQL as the backing store for Datomic.

The benefits of Datomic are too huge to go to the old crappy way of designing DBs...

Parenthesis serves the purpose of homoiconicity and it looks like Clojure is homoiconic... sexp / lambda expressions / HoF / macros / etc.

You know: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

Regarding people like you, the "haters gonna hate" type of people, here's what Rich Hickey has to say:

"Life is too short to spend time on such people. Plenty of Lisp experts have recognized Clojure as a Lisp. I don’t expect everyone to prefer Clojure over their favorite Lisp. If it wasn’t different in some ways, there’d be little reason for it to exist."

I'd add that you're commenting on a board created by a real Lisp hacker who created its own Lisp and, if I'm not mistaken, who's now recommending Clojure has the Lisp dialect to learn for Lisp newcomers.

Good. At least someone else than Schneier realizes Unicode is a major PITA from a correctness and security point of view. Schneier said it best: "Unicode is too complex to ever be secure".

Back to floats. It's nearly always a mistake to be using floats unless you're working on scientific computation (and 3D and game physics a are a kind of scientific computation).

If you don't know how to compute error propagation: floats aren't for you. There. As simple as that.

It's interesting to realize that most comments here do not adress that fundamental issue: it's not a particular bug in fp that's the problem. It's the overuse of fp itself that is the problem.

I can give you one the simple example of a f^cktarded use of floats: in a gigantic spec (HTML) someone decided there would be a probability expressed as a number between 0 and 1 with up to three decimal points. This is totally f^cktarded and lots of people complained that it was a retarded thing to do. You should express this as a number between 0 and 999. Why? Because you know that otherwise clueless programmers are going to make mistakes while using floating point numbers where they shouldn't.

And surely some programmers did. Some clueless monkeys in the Tomcat codebases decided it was a good idea to parse a number which was know to have at most three digits after the dot using... Java's built-in floating point parsing number library. That's silly of course: when a f^cktarded spec talks about a number between 0.000 and 0.999 you parse it manually into integers and do integers maths but I digress.

So what did happen? Some people realized they could throw Java's floating-point parsing number library into an infinite loop and that's it: the most deadly Java remote DoS exploit to attack website. By faking one browser request you could throw one thread on a webapp server in an infinite loop. Rinse and repeat and a single machine could DoS an entire server farm.

Due to stupid programmers using floating-point numbers when they shouldn't.

The problem is exacerbated by clueless people everywhere thinking floating-point numbers are a good idea. They're not. They should die a horrible days and the days where CPU didn't have floating-point numbers were arguably better days for 99.999% of what should our use.

Thankfully there's one area were even f^cktarded monkeys aren't using floating-point numbers: cryptography.

I'd say that unless you can write Goldberg's "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point numbers" then you shouldn't be using floating-point numbers. As simple as that.

Go read the list of Open Source project he's done: it's a humbling experience (even for those who managed to make it big with their startups).