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erik123on Google Launches Cloud Platform for Startups

I wonder what would be wrong with a few Digital Ocean or Kimsufi VPS or microserver systems? If managing your own server daemons is too hard, I wonder what that person is doing in the field of computing?

erik123on Google Launches Cloud Platform for Startups

Focus on building your product and don't worry about complex infrastructure. Google manages your application, database, and storage servers so you don't have to.

Very seductive of simple minds. Congratulations, Google, you have discovered of how to start fishing for the bottom of the barrel ...

erik123on A new foundation for mathematics

Vladimir Voevodsky is making an interesting step when he says that rewrite steps in math are clearly homeomorphisms. I would like to see some more formal examples of that. It sounds like a promising path.

Concerning the replacement of ZFC by Russell types -- contrary to lambda calculus' functions -- I have not run often enough in illustrations that demonstrate the usefulness of Russell types.

I am personally much more vouching for a replacement of Zermelo and Fränkel's sets by Alonzo Church's functions than Bertrand Russell's types at this point. It is probably just an issue of lack of familiarity, though.

erik123on Healthcare workers protest at Microsoft Seattle offices over Nevada tax dodge

Well, there must be something seriously wrong with healthcare funding if the workers need to protest at a seemingly unrelated office, that is, the one of Microsoft. What if they decided to relocate?

erik123on Frank Sinatra’s views on organized religion were decades ahead of his time

I totally agree that witch doctors, commercialized superstition, and spiritual hypocrites plague the realm of religion. But then again, plaguing the field of software, we have Microsoft, Apple, and other witch doctors. Does that mean that we should abandon the field of software? There is also linux, gnu, github and lots of other useful things, no?

erik123on Zeroing buffers is insufficient

It very much looks like a situation in which the system has already been compromised and is running malicious programs that it shouldn't. These malicious programs could still face the hurdle of being held at bay by the permission system that prevents them from reading your key file.

However, they could indeed be able to circumvent the permission system by figuring out what sensitive data your program left behind in uninitialized memory and in CPU registers.

Not leaving traces behind then becomes a serious issue. Could the kernel be tasked with clearing registers and clearing re-assigned memory before giving these resources to another program? The kernel knows exactly when he is doing that, no?

It would be a better solution than trying to fix all possible compilers and scripting engines in use. Fixing these tools smells like picking the wrong level to solve this problem ...

erik123on UCLA, Cisco and more join forces to replace TCP/IP

In NDN, all data is signed by data producers and verified by the consumers, and the data name provides essential context for security.

Centralizing the concept of security in the network's architecture will create an intractable problem. Certain parties will still want to impose their desire to be able to eavesdrop on the data. Therefore, there cannot be any real security in such centralized design for security.

The in tempore non suspecto in which it was still possible to roll out security jokes such as SSL, is over now. Nowadays, 95% of the world population (and their governments) will refuse to adopt any centralized security design, because they do not trust it.

In my impression, the project is dead on arrival.

erik123on Concerning zdnet’s use of the term ‘code monkeys’

No. I will never respond at ZDNet itself. Ever.

erik123on A call to arms: Helping Internet services accept anonymous users

Yes, this entire privacy scare is an opportunity to get rid of the advert-based business model and offer the opportunity to privacy-conscious users to get the same or a better service, in exchange for a few bitcoin cents, instead of getting tracked so that the jackals can better precision-bomb you with false commercial messages.

erik123on A call to arms: Helping Internet services accept anonymous users

Exactly. You have posted exactly what I wanted to post but you've bested me ;-) This is not a problem at all. This is an opportunity. That is what the non-profits at the Tor project do not see, exactly because they are non-profits. They do not see that every problem is a dreamed-of opportunity -- because you can work on solving it -- and when you've solved it, you can collect nominal peanut fees from the users in order to get rich.

erik123on Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

There is a reason why anybody who works in a job in which he faces the laws of nature, will prefer a very precise vocabulary and will shy away from using words that could not possibly have an unambiguous meaning. It is exactly the opposite of what for example advertisers, politicians or business people do. They want to keep everything as ambiguous as possible. They do this because in their jobs they do not face the laws of nature but other people. So, it is way less of a problem for them than for an engineer. The bridge will simply collapse if the computations are ambiguous.

erik123on Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

Given the fact that all corruption starts with the corruption of language, you will quickly have a good idea of what someone's job is. In programming, contradictory ambitions are pointless, because machines won't work properly if you allow them. In business or politics, you don't face machines but other people. It is perfectly normal for a business person or a politician to hide the contradictions in what he says by skillfully using and abusing meaningless words. The conflict between programmers and business people/politicians is that the latter are not aware of the fact that their contradictions may work absolutely fine in marketing or advertizing but that they will not fly if the field of software. Here a link to Orwell's "Politics and the English language": https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm. He is way more proficient than me at explaining what the problem is all about. By the way, this is the real reason why healthcare.gov from the get-go never had a snowball's chance in hell to go live for a reasonable budget and within the desired timeframe.

erik123on Ask HN: What skills are employable?

Well, my long-term experience is different. The time you've spent on old languages is never really lost.

Every language that you learn and abandon, makes you understand the next one much quicker. Furthermore, you learn the appreciate the new constructs and idioms that new language brings. The new language usually also supports all the old constructs that you got used to in the past. So, you can always fall back on those too.

Concerning computer science, and especially compiler construction, indeed as you wrote, it applies equally everywhere.

After six years of relatively easy money of mostly delegating PHP work to others, I moved on to nodejs this year. I am not that keen on delegating node work at this time, because I want to play a bit more with it by myself.

erik123on Self Employed CV

I tend to show my github account. Nobody asks any further questions about ability after that.

erik123on Ask HN: Guides on finding hidden APIs by monitoring network traffic?

I suspect that http://humdi.net/vnstat/ or something similar could do the trick.