tempsolution

Hmm cool :). Not the ultimate solution, but this sounds useful! Thanks

Calling is broken. I wished Apple would just add an option "Block all calls unless their number is in contacts". It's ridiculous that this option is only available in Do Not Disturb. It's like Apple was trying to somehow profit from robo-callers.

It's time to put calls into the grave. The next step needs to be something like we have for websites. You need to get a personal SSL certificate to call and it will be bound to your identity. Then whenever you call, a random certificate will be generated to authenticate yourself to the callee. The callee will verify that the anonymous root certificate of the caller wasn't revoked. And then either block the call or let it through.

Robocallers would simply get their root certificate revoked and would be unable to carry out ANY other call in the name of that company until they paid the imposed fines and re-imbursed their victims for the lost time and annoyance. People creating these companies would lose the ability to obtain another certificate for another company until the previous charges are resolved.

This is just a momentary brain dump, but essentially all problems in our society revolve around a lack of accountability. We have the technology to anonymously impose accountability in everything digital. Let's start using it!

Exactly. I always find it amusing when people say they did something for 0$ by working in their spare time.

This calculation doesn't make any sense. Can you build the initial Google project in your spare-time? Probably, if you find enough qualified volunteers.

Does that mean it's a viable business?

Absolutely not.

You need to check how much you would have get paid when working in your last highest paying job... (Even when you do things in spare time)

And it never will be :D. There was never any need for crypto currency to begin with and pretty much all of them fail to deliver on their core promise of decentralization. If they do deliver on that promise, they are so slow that the idea of global deployment is ridiculous...

The core idea of crypto currency (i.e. byzantine fault tolerance) is 2000 years old. The fact that this happens now already demonstrates that there never was any need for this and there won't be.

The main reason that D hasn't been picked up by anyone is mostly because it is an evolution of C++, not a revolution. Discarding an entire ecosystem for an evolution is not going to happen. Rust took a very different approach and just threw everything away. D looks and feels too much like C++, I would rather have hoped that effort would have been spent on making C++ better.

What number of things will happen?

This argument is so unbelievably stupid, that I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, encryption in WhatsApp is targeted towards consumers. You won't catch terrorists by limiting encryption. If terrorists and other criminals are not using encryption anyway, then they are so stupid that they deserve to be caught.

The only thing a lack of privacy does is throwing us further into dictatorship. Just imagine a madmen, like uhm... say Trump, with the full power of the secret service behind him and limited to privacy for end-users. Well this is just great. All the dirt he can dig up about his opponents. He asks foreign governments to dig up dirt, okay, that means right now the NSA isn't too much inclined to help this guy out, but what if they were?

If you water down privacy you are robbing the people of their only chance to organize protests and rise up to authoritarian governments.

Last but not least, the crimes prevented by not using encryption are absolutely negligible. The numbers are so freaking low that each day more people will die in car accidents in the US alone than would die globally because of pervasive usage of unbreakable encryption.

This analogy of `Uh a person could be prevented from getting raped is more important than preventing a fall into dictatorship` is so contrived that I don't even understand how anyone can eat this shit. Bad things happen all over the place and you are buying this sham argument that is preying on human psychology.

Yes of course. The old argument that Linux is free of backdoors because it is open source. It's such a ridiculous claim. Software systems on that scale are so complex, there is NO way whatsoever to make sure there isn't a backdoor in there. I would go as far as saying that OpenSource software by definition is more vulnerable to backdoors than closed source software, exactly because the source code is available and anyone with some credibility can make patches. It is the dreamland scape of the NSA.

Hacking into closed source code is much more dangerous (politically) for them and also more difficult.

Sorry, but Linux hasn't gotten anywhere in a long while. They were trying something that may have worked (Ubuntu + Unity), but this just looks and feels like a toy still. When it comes to GUI and user experience, let's face it, there is a very very TINY market left for Linux. I am a software developer for a very long time and had been running QubesOS as well as most popular distros. Of those QubesOS is the clear winner, since it looks pretty much as sad as any other Linux but at least it gives you something you can't get anywhere else: Security.

As much as I hate Windows and MacOS, they just both run circles around Linux when it comes to graphics, GUI design and user experience and that is why they have such a big market share. It's this old delusion of some Linux fanboys that Linux would spread around the globe if the evil Apple and Microsoft would just allow them. There are few people who CAN use it and much fewer still that are willing to use it as a desktop system.

Yes, let's best put it into the hand of the agency/government that tried to hide the information from the public in the first place...

"Please defendent, have look at the evidence we gathered about your murder case. It's best if you decide which of the evidence we should use in court against you."

lmao (on a sad note, this is how day to day business at goverments looks like and precisely WHY we need whistleblowers)

Big tech is a threat to democracy? What a backwards, self-serving hunk of junk. Big tech might be the only way to sustain democracy. Technology gives governments the power to instill a lasting total dictatorship, something completely unprecedented in the history of mankind. Of course they are afraid that big tech takes away from their pie by becoming too powerful and preventing them from setting us up for an eternal dictatorship.

Wake up people. China is the canary in the coal mine. If big tech doesn't step up and provide some sort of a shadow government, pressuring our real government, we are actually really screwed. Going forward, the government NEEDs to be undermined by the private sector, this is the only way to provide a power balance.

I mean "Data structures & Algorithms" is a very broad topic.

The baseline is high-school.

Well "the average CS major" is also a very broad statement :D. I have no good overview of what an average CS major is, to be honest.

I think we are talking about different things. Let's say you learn how to build a hashmap, how to solve TSP with dynamic programming. Conceptually, this is possible to learn in 9 months if you are a good student (and therefore, your are talents are already wasted in this bootcamp). But what if I ask you some follow up questions? Modify the problem. Will you be able to explain how perfect hashing works or what the runtime of a hashmap is if the hashing function is not O(1). How different hashing procedures lead to different qualities for different implementations of hash maps?

We are not talking about knowing that hashmap give you O(1) lookup if you are lucky. If that is the skill you want to learn, sure, 9 months will do. But truly understanding what you are talking about and being able to explain, augment, modify/improve data structure and suit algorithms to your needs... Proving that they still work correctly after your modification. Understanding how that damn distributed consensus algorithm works that seems to have a bug that fucks up your database every now and then.

Yes agreed. You don't need to know that for 99% of CS jobs. But we are not talking about whether bootcamps can prepare you for work in average code mills, we are talking about whether they can replace CS education.

As a matter of fact I DO believe that bootcamps solve a critical purpose in filling the vast amount of gaps in our IT market. But I am always surprised again and again why "the new kid on the block" always needs to attack other completely valid paths (like CS major). They are completely different things made for a different purpose.

I think people need to realize that CS major is NOT the right choice for most coding jobs. But that does not mean that a bootcamp can replace a CS major, it just means that a bootcamp can be an efficient shortcut to hit the job market running.

Sorry, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to learn the CS fundamentals in 9 months. Period. What you may be able to do is to teach people how to game interviews within 9 months, sure. Good luck once that performance review comes around...

I was very interested in math and theoretical CS. It took the whole batch of students, including the ones in honors math bachelor a good 2 years of daily intense study alone to get the basic feeling for math straight (I was part of the IDEA league program in Europe and I would consider my CS studies among the best in Europe, especially when I see what students come out of Berkeley and Toronto). Then it took at least another year or two of algorithm studies to properly deal with algorithms and data structures. Also note the exam failure rate of about 90%.

Sure, you can hack some knowledge together in 9 months. But it is biologically impossible for the brain to properly learn these things in 9 months. If you can do it, you are a genius and your talents are completely wasted in this bootcamp. You should instead apply for a PhD in astrophysics at MIT or something and start contributing to mankind...

Yeah what you are doing is nowadays known as the "Trump approach".

Hilarious. Hobbyist projects for the win! In general it is helpful not to be completely ignorant of how the state-of-the art in your line of work is done and perhaps ask why it is done this way.

Its almost inconceivable to me how it is possible that a company, no matter how small, does all these things so utterly wrong that shit like this is possible.

Even as a child, when playing around with Delphi and Turbo Pascal, I made my backups dutifully onto an external drive. I did not use version control because I had no clue what that was (and, arguably anything is better than SVN), but at least I had backups of everything.

Why would you think that we send 7bn people into space? There should not have been 7bn people to start with. It just happened because somehow species tend to multiply until their environment can't sustain further growth. In space, it will be MUCH harder to sustain a population, as a result, the population there will be much smaller (think of maybe 100.000), at least in the early stages.

I agree that we should be able to save the earth. I think both are possible and also intertwined, because whatever our solution, it will likely require advanced capabilities to deploy technology into earth's orbit, be it large scale solar shielding, some atmosphere transformers, or whatever.

Still, repairing earth and creating space ships are two different things. We did not design earth, and the size of it makes it hard to control. It will be MUCH easier to sustain life in an underground lab (or space ship) than it is to repair earth. At least conceptually. But of course you have a point that we should not abandon most of the population for two reasons:

1. It's a bit cruel and probably only the worst of mankind will survive again, as it always did.

2. Project "Space" might turn out to be one hell of a disaster, since it's hard to predict how humans will fare in space. So we should have a backup plan.

It is a bit like with a formula one car. If you go through the curve with 100 mph, you will die, because you really need to go through the curve at 200 mph for aerodynamics to give you enough downward force to keep you on the track...

We are in a very similar situation here. We need to aggressively speed up and focus our engineering efforts to understand nature and to potentially "suck the gases out of the atmosphere" (one solution, we put it there, we should be able to get it back out, if that was really the reason anyway).

Never in mankind's history have the odds been so in our favor. Our technology improves at unprecedented speeds and its only going to go faster. It has to go faster, that is. Otherwise we actually might be wiped out.

I never understood why people think its a good idea to dial back progress & technology to where we were a few hundred years ago... The earth will die anyway in a few billion years. There is only one way forward: Out into space. At the current rate we will be able to do just that, within the allotted time. Even if we can't save earth in the end (who knows), we will still have enough time to leave the sinking ship. But we also have a pretty good shot at to repair the damage we have done.

But the answer for both trajectories is the same: Technology, more technology and faster, faster. If that means more pollution, that's okay. As long as we advance faster than we destroy (which we are doing already), we are golden! Stopping or going slower is what will kill us.

So people, stop whining about pollution and global warming. There is no way to stop that other than technology. Developing countries are not going to stop polluting. Most notably seen with the Amazon. We have no true control over what other countries do. But we can repair the damage they do, via technology deployed on our home soil. That is precisely what we must do & develop. Waiting for global consensus and contracts is waiting for death... Hell, they can't even agree on some minimal pollution numbers between the G7 countries. How the hell are you going to get all 200 nations into one basket. It's ludicrous.

On that note, keep in mind that countries like the USA are the world's number one polluter. Developing countries do some serious shit, but on a smaller scale.

Yes another great read, for the land of the free and brave.

Well yeah, all of their posts were from the same domain. It's a nice design compared to other schemes.

There is nothing particularly impressive about the Apollo program, at least not these days. You are essentially comparing today's frontier of High-Tech research with 50 year old "needs to work reliably" technology, which had different requirements even back then.

With every passing day, Trump increases my amazement of his ability to do harm and destroy things wherever he turns. If I was working for military intelligence, I would probably be furious about this idiot spoiling state secrets at every turn to benefit himself.

This sounds weird. It is linked with suicides and decreased life satisfaction... I wonder how all the other drugs fare, even alcohol and smoking. How did they factor in the bias that is obviously at play here?

If I am super happy with my life, I will likely not take an excessive amount of drugs. I would say I am reasonably happy with my life and I like taking drugs every now and then just for fun and because it feels nice.

The story goes totally different for people with shit lives (which is the majority of the population unfortunately). If I am already in some sort of depression, drugs will aggravate these problems. They will show how nice you can actually feel, just to go back into your sucking life afterwards. Who wouldn't want to take drugs all day in this scenario?

But that doesn't mean that drugs themselves cause these problems. Same as meat itself is not unhealthy. The link by statistics is very much against "Correlation does not imply Causation".

It's more an indicator that apparently either not many meaningful things happen (which I doubt) or somehow people use this a some retro-wanking where they imagine "Uh yeah back in high school I was also working on stuff like this, those were the days".

What I am saying is that it doesn't surprise me people do these projects, what surprises me is that enough people care about them for it to make the front page of HN.

You will be surprised how much less healthy cheap plant based food can be than meat... Now you get human pesticides (the ones sprayed on plants), GMO and plant pesticides (the one plants have developed against mammals) on top of the low quality crap that was previously called meat.

Diabetes is the cause of nothing. Diabetes is not a disease, it is a status. Like a runny nose when you have the flu. What you can say is that people with Diabetes tend to develop something... Sure. But causality is not causation.

There is a big gap between "crap" and AAA for sure. But think about this (in today's time):

* Half Life 2 looks like crap

* Fallout 3 looks like crap

* Actually any game from more than a few years back, looks like crap

But any of those are hopelessly out of reach for any Indie developer even with today's tools.

There is real AAA from earlier days, that still looks good these days, like:

* Battlefield 3

* Crysis 2

* Call Of Duty Modern Warfare

* etc.

But these games have among the highest budget in history of game development and a respectable revenue stream...

What the author is trying to say is that most people think most games looks like crap (I think so too). There is no point in making AA games (let's assume he didn't mean actual AAA games) as an Indie developer, because people will still think your game looks like crap. And those people who don't (I for instance really like SNES games still), will also be satisfied with the art he can create.

Let's look at Anno 1602 vs. Anno 1800. This is more in the domain of the author. I really like both games and I have to say, Anno 1800 has AMAZING graphics. But the game gets boring after playing it one time to the Investor level... Anno 1602 has graphics that you can probably manage as an Indie developer these days (since you don't need to optimize it at all and have much better tooling). This game never gets old ;). I have more fun playing that one than Anno 1800. Which is another reason why AAA graphics is unneeded. You need shiny graphics if your game sucks. And creating games that suck is what todays AAA industry is all about.

This sounds sketchy. Either the rest of the industry is incredibly incompetent or they are deliberately omitting a huge drawback of this solution. And I don't see lack of expandability as a drawback, just buy a bit more RAM to start with.

Then there are NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Phi (i.e. Knightslanding)... So they are trying to sell us that neither AMD, NVIDIA or Intel have though of this "ingenious" decision to increase the efficiency obtained by co-locating CPU and memory? The fact that they deliberately avoid addressing this elephant in the room makes me super skeptical.

I don't like clickbait... The article starts to suggest that calculus is hard to reason about and "irrational". In the end all it is really saying is that calculus requires irrational numbers, well doh! And guess what, you even need complex numbers. And the question is not about "shopping" numbers, there is a history to all of that. If you want something universal, use complex numbers. Try to teach that to a pre-schooler and you will find that you might wanna start with something simpler.

Interesting. I think its time to get rid of this junk. I always had a bad feeling about AVs, due to repeated "extra vulnerabilities" they seemed to introduce, while not providing measurable added value compared to Windows Defender.

That Kaspersky is apparently too stupid to fix this leak properly even after it was pointed out, suggests to me that their developers obviously are incompetent and the trust int hem doing AV right is approaching zero, if they can't even load a script into a website without leaking like the Iraqi marine.

Well, that's hilarious. A solar-panel road. As if obtaining power efficiently from solar energy wasn't difficult enough. No you have to also build it into a road, which is also completely useless, even if it worked. We don't have a space problem. It's not like you couldn't place these things somewhere else...

This might be one of the core reasons why Linux never took off as a Desktop solution. Also looking at the comments here just shows how out of touch people are with the real world...

If you relish in terse commands that don't mean anything to anyone who hasn't been spending their last 20 years working on the command line, then go for it. Just realize that most of us (talking about the already small population that is software developers) are not interested is spending anytime on dealing with this junk. This is not to mention the other 99% of the population who doesn't even know what Linux or Bash is, and good riddance for them...

The JavaScript code the author posted is immediately intelligible to anyone who has been keeping in touch with programming language developments over the past years. It doesn't even matter if you come from C#, Python, JS, Java, etc. It should be familiar to all of them. You might not know exactly what it does, but it seems oddly familiar.

I may be making a leap here, but I would go as far as saying that this very attitude of command-line elitism is the primary reason why Linux has had zero chance to take hold in the Desktop space. The developers have no clue why "normal" people would not want to use the command line (and I am including myself in it) and their efforts of creating a GUI (just look at the junk that is KDE, Gnome and Unity... Proudly sold off as GUI) have been so out of touch with reality, that I can't even.....

Anyway, each to their own. I am mostly using the command line to start a build process. While I am able to do a lot of more advanced stuff, including properly using VIM, I am actually regretting spending the time on learning it. These days I wrote most of my "bash" scripts in Python instead (just to clarify: I write scripts in Python, for which it seems well suited. I don't see Python as a viable choice for creating actual software). There are some scenarios in which Bash is still a better choice, but thankfully they are far and few between.