3,652 karma · joined April 24, 2009
1. It shouldn't be in a dictionary, so that the only option is brute force 2. It should be very hard to brute force
#1 means "don't use anything in this guy's list."
For #2, the concept of "password haystacks" is useful:
How would they know that unless they have your previous password in plaintext?
Security Fail
If they wanted to do that, they could just all put stuff in the same place.
What's your point? The current system is widely ridiculed, too. Hey, I'm ridiculing it now.
"It should be complicated to reflect the complications and nuances of our societies. Enough of us obviously think that there should be special cases for certain situations that special cases will arise."
I agree, special cases will arise. But I think we have to aggressively limit the number of those. I'm suggesting a way. If there is a hard limit on the length of the tax code, there will come a point when to add Special Case X, you have to delete Special Case Y.
Law is like code; indeed, it's called a legal code. One of the best predictors of how many bugs your code will have is simply how much code there is. Our legal code is massive bloatware, and it's buggy as heck.
Want a working tax code? Make it short.
If I were King of America, I would mandate that the entire tax code fit on a single typewritten page with specified font and margin. Each year, a group of 3rd-graders would be asked to complete the tax form given all the necessary information. If they couldn't, the tax code would be considered invalid.
It's NOT INCOME. It was already my money. If anything, I should get it back with interest, since they had it for a while.
Wouldn't be able to legally. If he feels strongly enough about this to start a company, he may feel strongly enough to defy the law.
I hope so.
If they're also a telecom provider who can't comply with wiretaps, that's also huge.
Personally I think this is very exciting. Governments' game has been to make secret deals for surveillance; by announcing openly that they won't cooperate, this company will either succeed or may force the government to state openly the level of surveillance they demand. Citizens should know how out-of-control it's gotten.
Comment 1: "Microsoft's buying patents for a long-defunct browser demonstrates once again that these are solely legal weapons, not bits of useful knowledge to help make products."
Comment 2: "I don't know, maybe IE is just that far behind."
I feel the emotion of this reaction, but I think the proper response to this is the one that C.S. Lewis gave: size is just a number; significance is attached to things by minds.
If you don't think tall people more important than short ones, or feet more important than eyes, why do you think stars more important than people? Certainly the stars don't think any such thing. They don't think at all. We do.
Here's a quote from his space novel "Perelandra" where this concept comes up:
"Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is its least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopoic power within him that very majesty before which he was now asked to abase himself, and that mere numbers could not over-awe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they thmselves could no more supply than a banker's ledger. But this knowledge remained an abstraction. Mere bigness and loneliness overbore him."
You bought XGB this month. You didn't use it all? Ooops, you overpaid. Punished.
You used more? Ooops, you pay a higher rate for the overage. Punished.
How about we treat this like any other commodity and I get exactly what I pay for?
My power bill isn't the same every month. My water bill isn't either. I know my patterns and roughly the monthly cost, and I can use less if money is tight.
You know how much cellular data I use per month? 0KB. Why? Because I don't want a giant fixed price add-on to my bill. If I could buy a smart phone, use WiFi 95% of the time, and spend $5 on data once in a while when I need it, I would use some. But I'm not jumping on a fixed price. I'm not paying for more than what I use.
My two biggest gripes with PHP:
1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.
2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.
I've chosen to chat with you, and you've chosen to say something. Normal human trust mechanisms apply. Censoring our conversation because you think you know what's best is ridiculous.
The minute I thought a chat client was actively thwarting my conversation, I would uninstall it.
Show: make sure the awesome stuff you do is visible to people, and prioritize stuff that will be visible.
Celebrate: do something visible to celebrate your successes and your team's. It makes people feel good and reinforces a sense of progress and success. Buy a round at the pub, bring in a cake, whatever.
Support: publicly support and thank others: other devs, business people, etc. Find nice things to say.
All of these really fall under "be nice and encourage people", and may have the side benefit of getting you paid more.
That's not too hard to swallow, is it?
For example, he could have talked about the N-Hexane poisoning without lying. He could have cited news reports, or traveled to interview people, or done it over the phone, or even gotten the info from secondhand interviews. He could have said "imagine a man who..." and proceeded to paint a painful picture based on the facts that were already public.
But he didn't. He chose to pretend he had met these people. He would say that made the story more emotionally impactful, and maybe that's true. But it also poisoned it. It was a very condescending move to pull on his audiences; there is neither artistic nor factual integrity in it.
If he had stuck to the facts, he would still have had a great performance. Too bad.
Like many Ruby developers, I left PHP because I saw the kind of stagnation the author describes at the beginning of this article. I saw lots of good ideas originating and flourishing in the Ruby world, and sometimes trickling back to PHP. I saw a more well-thought-out language that seemed worthy of all that attention. So I hopped.
The libraries and library management tools and frameworks available to me now are awesome. Ruby itself is getting faster all the time. Is there really any reason left to stick with PHP other than inertia? (I don't mean that dismissively; if you have a massive existing code base, that's real inertia and changing would be a tall order.)
You can substitute Python or Node or whatever for Ruby here, but my point is: why fight the uphill battle to bring good tools to a language when other languages already have them?
I use open source for all my tools of choice. My browser, editor, programming language, libraries, web framework, server operating system, etc etc are all open source. I get tens of thousands of dollars in value from open source.
In gratitude for that, and to keep the ball rolling, I do spend some effort contributing back to open source.
StackOverflow is no different, to me. The info on SO has saved me many hours of frustration and taught me lots of new things. Answering questions (and asking good ones) is my way of giving back.
And in both cases, it's partly selfish, too: whatever I contribute back to open source or to StackOverflow is not lost to me when I move to the next job.
Sure, I've given many hours to StackOverflow. But it's given many more hours to me in saved time. I want to keep that around.
But is that SO's fault? What more could SO do to earn your trust? And what alternative to SO do you propose?
Each blocked site lost:
- $X directly in business missed during those hours
- The trust of users who believed the warning
If they lost these things by arson or slander, the perpetrator might be punished. But since it was the government, they'll probably get nothing but an apology.
Any justice system will have some collateral damage: standing trial costs you time, money and reputation, even in a fair trial where you're declared innocent. But since the damage is so real and sometimes severe, we should REALLY force government to be careful how it applies itself. Warrants, oversight, auditing, judicial review, etc.
No bureaucrat should have a "ruin this business" button.
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EDIT: Is there a guideline against 'TL;DR' comments? When I've written them in the past, they've been upvoted.
People may find that too creepy, but Amazon could do something else: gather lots of feedback about what fits customers and what doesn't. You get 3 pairs of pants, rate them "too big" and "too small" and "just right". Eventually that could correlate that if you and Customer X both fit these pants recently, the shorts he bought last week will probably fit you too.
(This would be more complicated for women, of course.)
I don't know about you, but I would pay for Gmail in a heartbeat. It's a great service. I can guarantee that Comcast would make something 1,000 times crappier and that I'd waste hundreds of hours of my life fighting with it.
In fact, I'd rather be paying for Gmail so that I'd be their customer and not their product. I'm happy that I pay for Pinboard because I know that it motivates them to please me and not someone else to whom they can sell my data. And I'm happy because my payment is an investment in the continued existence of a service I value.
You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market. But I don't think it's true.