jlujan

Apperently Sari Koshetz doesn't deny anything

http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-cautio...

Writing and grammar aside, I think the buddy-buddy way in which the TSA blog is written is condescending. There is a difference between trying to put a friendly face on the TSA and addressing the public in a tone of familiar conversation with pre-teens (no-offense to the youth as they probably see through this BS too). It is arguably worse than the McCarthyisms spewed by Napolitano, Pistole and countless Senators in defense of the tactics.

"As far as I know there is no industry group for still-image photographers anything like the MPAA or RIAA."

The American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America. They do not have the deep pockets or political clout of MPAA or RIAA but they are large industry groups.

I think someone else mentioned a class action suite against Google for copyright infringement by photographers. The lawsuit started with scanning and displaying images from the Google Library Project but includes infringement claims for images.google.com, etc.

http://asmp.org/articles/asmp-qa-google-class-action.html

Been a reader of your blog for a while now, and enjoy your insight. I do feel that chimeracoder's criticism is valid, regardless of your argument of establishing objectivity through participation. As a reader, the inclusion of Facebook Connect and Comments really detracts from the credibility, err. sincerity, of your article.

"toolbar that helps you shop online more effectively but neglects to mention that it will send a list of everything you buy online to the company that provides the toolbar."

What about a website that injects its content on every website you visit, regardless of your willingness to participate as a user? Or tracks every visit regardless of your willingness to participate?

Exhibit A: http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/facebook-reveals-its-user-tra...

There is no terms of service or privacy statement on your site disclosing that you are effectively sharing my activity with Facebook. By the way, I opt-out through the disconnect and Ghostery Chrome extensions, so your site has no comment system... just a Comments heading.

"Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web."

As the website operator that uses Facebook Connect, you are signaling to Facebook that you are OK with their current strategy to exist on every page on the internet and dictate the way content should be shared. You cannot complain that they are getting rid of the ability to automatically share your blog content in facebook when they have given you the ability to incorporate all the same functionality directly on your page. It is a genius move on their part. They no longer have to worry about users visiting facebook less over time if they are on every other page the user might visit.

In this example you also have to look at events during each administration. The fear after 9/11 cause many to reconsider what was reasonable encroachment on civil liberties. Everyone has an opinion on this. Mine is that it was seriously misguided and has resulted in egregious abuses.

Same goes to illegal immigrants. You do not need proof of citizenship to acquire a Tax ID or file a return. Those that are picked up and tried for illegal immigration are much more likely to not be deported/jailed if they have all of their taxes in order.

Just another example of how private business and hackers are more effective at creating open and accessible government data.

Refer to Sec 215 of bill.

I just passed through the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The back-scatter scanner is right next to the metal detector and the procedure was that they would "offer" you the choice to walk through the new scanner and said if you turned it down that they would have to perform a physical search. I told them I did not wish to go through the scanner, at which point they walked me past the metal detector (not through) to the pat-down area. While standing there for a few moments for the TSA personel, several people went through the metal detector with no further search. Further, the notification that the machine is still in testing phase is posted after you have already passed through it. It was abundantly clear at that point, the new policy of intimidation and humiliation has nothing to do with my personal safety.

The unilateral and unpublished changes in screening procedure are blatant abuses of authority and undermine the principles of our society. The argument that I have given implicit consent to being searched just by buying an airplane ticket is completely voided when the search procedures are constantly changing without detailed public knowledge or immediate explanation.

I have no fears about flying in general or those caused by the threat of terrorism. I am much more likely to die in a small plane crash with one of my pilot friends at the controls. What terrifies me the most is this blatant disregard of civil liberties and the apparent complacency with which the public submits to the draconian policies being put in place without consent of the people.

I cannot help to notice the "Likes" at the bottom of the post and the immediate loss of credibility.

I think the expediency by which it arrived at the top might possibly be indicative of how many people have exactly the same sentiment. Possibly we were all just waiting for some one to say it first. Put our disdain for the phrase in text.

It is an interesting concept but a dangerous one. It cuts at the heart of the conflict between the USPTO, the FDA, NIHS and "big pharma". Drug companies sink mil/billions into developing drugs with the incentive of revenue guarantees from drug patents. However, most big "breakthrough" drugs are heavily funded by the NIHS (other government grants) and therefore... tax payer money. The FDA, instituted to protect the public, is heavily backlogged and drags their feet approving a new drug. Usually, by the time the FDA approves a drug, the patent holder has limited amount of time to make up development costs before the market is flooded with generics.

The real question is why any of this exists in the first place? Does the patent system really incentivise the creation of technology? Does the FDA really protect the public? How should this effect drugs that the government and tax payers actually pay (if in part) to develop?

With Tamiflu, used to treat H1N1 and other serious flu, there is a company in India that produces a "generic" and could fill the gap in demand. Their generic version has been cleared by the WHO, but due to US patents, cannot be distributed to the US or its trade partners. The same holds true to many "life-saving" drugs, such as HIV/AIDS cocktails.

I am not saying that so called "big pharma" is evil or that there is some social justice demanded, I do not think that to be the case, just that the whole system in the US and other countries suffers from serious fundamental issues. To justify suing someone, there must be a claim of wrong doing on account of a specific party. Who is really responsible for the shortage of N1H1 vaccine? I would say we all are...

I wonder if the original intent of posting was to be helpful or for mockery. My second language to learn was PHP, perl being the first, and I have since moved on. I probably asked,( myself/google not others,) similar questions the article covers. But the fact that articles like this continue to be titled "Advanced..." is a hint to where the language and community are as a whole. I think the bigger issue is a commingling of subjects. If your intent is to learn PHP, learn programming with PHP as a language. If your intent is to learn web development, learn web development in terms of available technologies, industry standards, and best practices. A lot of the articles content is laughable not because it is common sense PHP, but common sense programming/web development. PHP != Web... or is that PHP !== Web?

Ever try debugging javascript in a dynamic site with invalid HTML... enough said. No, the user shouldn't care but so little of the code we write is actually for the user.

This is interesting. I have been using django for a while and work on a custom framework that barrows ideas, not code, from it's URL dispatch. I haven't really liked specifying and carrying around a list of regular expressions some place. This has given me new ideas.

With the e-mail functionality so well done, mms seems a little redundant. I would call it ahead of its time for dropping mms. However... I will say the way it handles it is annoying... You have to log in to some site to view it? Why not just convert it to an e-mail?

I get down voted because their php site leaks memory? Nice.

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 8126464) (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in /home/ryan/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/falbum/wordpress-falbum-plugin.php on line 433

Maybe an article about python should use it to present it on the web?

Even though I typically read HN on my 12" PowerBook. I am typing this on my brand new (today) 15" MBP. I haven't done much on my 12" PowerBook for some time and use it very much as a "Netbook". If I am not reading the latest threads on it, I will be reading them on my iPhone. Why exactly does Apple need a "netbook" when it has the Touch and iPhone? If you want a cheap Apple "netbook" go buy a used iBook. Or a really expensive Air... now I am just rambling...

In

Transparency is all well and good. I am sure that is happily accepted oversight/regulation. So I wouldn't expect any arguments that hedge funds need way more oversight/regulation. On the issue of transparency, why not require hedge funds to disclose their short positions? This is all such a farce. To hell with them.

How can you ignore the possibility that having a derivatives market that is ten (10) times the size of the global GDP, might be an issue?

How did this make it on to HN... The author of the article is clearly confused of the issue. More, who the hell cares... it is Twitter. If your are worried about some one ruining your good name by hacking your twitter account, you most certainly have more relevant personal issues to address. How was the article "techie" at all aside for name dropping and the author's self validation from "implementing" a similar auth API? burn:period:

It is still shooting yourself in the foot. There are a lot of questionable design decisions that will take a while to unlearn when PHP is your first language. The OO model is still a little screwed up, and uglier than C++ even, because of lack of namespace. There are arguments for and against it, I wont get religious. But if you want to be a "programmer" then you must move quickly from PHP. If you want to only be a web developer... fine. PHP is a baby step, even if you stick to dynamic languages.

This article is a poorly done "look how smart I am". First, the title makes little sense. If you were going to compare and contrast Python to Java, this first thing to come to mind would be static typing, not a compile step. Second, I was going to complain about the first-class functions as well. By his example, PHP has first class functions as well because you can define a function out side of a class. But we all know PHP does not, in fact, have first class functions because you cannot pass a function as an argument or return a function as a value from another function in PHP. I think you can get the point across better with this example...

def fun_factory(scale):

    def inner_func(arg1,arg2):

        return scale * ( arg1 + arg2)

    return inner_func

class myclass(object):

    def __init__(self,scale_func):

        self.better_example = scale_func

if __name__ == "__main__":

    print fun_factory(10)(5,5)

    myinst = myclass(fun_factory(10))

    print myinst.better_example(5,5)

"JSON stacks not only do that, but they do it better because the set of available data structures in JSON is constrained to a sensible subset"

To my knowledge, there is no "built-in" way to specify if a number should be parsed as an int or a float in JSON. The idea that one of JSON's strengths is it "is constrained to a sensible subset" is a naive view. Yes it is a strength if you are only using dynamic languages, which is valid given the nature of most of the projects talked about on YC. However, enterprise projects are usually loaded with formal specifications, UML diagrams, and usually use languages with static typing. A mixture perfect for SOAP.

"you don't end up having to replicate complex classes in multiple different languages"

SOAP and almost every SOAP stack have been designed to prevent this. Almost every SOAP stack has a tool with naming similar to wsdl2java, wsdl2perl, etc.,. Again, narrowly looking at SOAP without understanding the associated technologies, mostly WSDL and XSD, the technology as a whole cannot be effectively evaluated. I don't expect any of the Web 2.0 AJAX guys to understand the benefits of an implementation with such a formalized specification or broad scope. However, SOAP was created to fit the needs of large enterprises trying to interop with other large enterprises. It covers a huge scope and various edge cases. JSON covers a very narrow scope. The original post talked of SOAP as a dead technology. It isn't. Is it the best for AJAX style web services? Maybe not. Don't simply disregard it as a viable solution in all cases though.

Yes, people use the transport layer agnostic aspect of SOAP. The first SOAP service I implemented used SMTP. It worked very well for sending messages to offline clients. SMTP provided queuing and storage of messages until a client came online and requested it.

Have you looked at wsdl2java? http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/user-guide.html#WSDL2JavaBuil...

SOAP was engineered by enterprise companies for enterprise applications. It came form the same thought train as COM/DCOM, CORBA, etc.,. It is still a major player in the enterprise world. You wont see many B2B apps that don't use SOAP or some other XML payload. I have used SOAP extensively in PHP and C#, together even. The support is there for it if you look. Java actually has good support for SOAP, if not the best (http://java.sun.com/webservices/ http://ws.apache.org/axis/).

Most of the haters on SOAP and other thick WS technologies are people trying to do simple AJAX type message transfers. SOAP is a little heavy for that. But when you try passing messages between multiple systems in multiple languages, it becomes the obvious solution. As far as the following response goes... "allow me to put it this way: 1k of text to get a 2 or 3 digit temperature from a weather service." SOAP stacks will automatically parse that 2-3 digit number into the correct data type for the platform/language you are using. Now say instead of a 2-3 digit number you passed an entire object or data structure. Would it be easier to role your own parser or have the SOAP stack automatically marshal it for you?

Added to this, when you use the full set of SOAP technologies including WSDL and XSD, you also have data validation and to some extent, documentation. This is what JSON and the likes lack. If you provide a WSDL I can look at it and usually use a tool to automatically generate all the data types and interfaces needed (ie. wsdl in .Net). You point me at a JSON interface and I have no such luxury. I wont know what data to expect until you write documentation for it. Further neither of us would know if each others messages were valid without some kind of custom validator.

Also SOAP is transport layer agnostic. If you use HTTP you can take advantage of any compression the underlying platform supports. Apache's Axis and Perl's SOAP::Lite both support HTTP compression in their SOAP stacks. I am aware of ways to enable it in .Net as well.

Advances in computing power and network resources are making SOAP a more viable option, not less. It comes down to using the right tool for the job and REST is viable in some applications, but SOAP is as well. SOAP's life span will be at least as long as COM or CORBA. They haven't completely died yet either...

I opted for changing my DNS servers. That really isn't the point though. I believe Verisign was prevented from doing similar things several years ago.

I meant to add a link. http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/02/javascript_t...

The reason is that microformats are a perversion of CSS/HTML. CSS is not markup; it is to define visual style. I think it rather humorous that web "developers" rejoiced at the leaps and bounds HTML made when it went from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. One of the reasons is that browsers made up what ever HTML tags they saw fit. XHTML provided a way to define a standard set of tags and attributes and give application developers the means to extend them without breaking other peoples code. This includes semantic descriptions.

Most of the arguments for using microformats are forgetting that many smart people have already, more or less, solved the content description issue. Thats what the X in XHTML is. By specifying that XHTML is valid XML, you can abide by all the rules for XML... mainly the extensible portion. You can add custom attributes to any tag you feel. There are DTDs, XSD, RelaxNG, Schemetron, etc; DTDs and XSD seem to have won the battle over document definitions. The only arguments against custom XHTML attributes are becoming more and more irrelevant. Arguments based on browser support for custom XSD or DTD documents are already irrelevant because most browsers have, or will, add support for them as a requirement to support novel things like XSLT. Arguments that DTDs and Schemas are two difficult are not really arguments. They are difficult for a reason, semantic definition is difficult. Many of the problems with microformats, i.e. namespace collisions, have been "solved" in the various XML standards. There are already many, many tools for parsing and using XML including namespaces, XIncludes, XSD, DTD, XSLT, etc... However, the tools to make microformats actually usable and useful, do not exist. Other arguments about custom attributes not being XHTML Strict valid are also irrelevant. Adding custom attributes by definition shouldn't be strict valid. Strict validity is checked against the xhtml1-strict.dtd DTD. Not being XHTML strict valid isn't a bad thing as long as the document is still valid XML and a schema/DTD document exists to prove it. This is, in my opinion, a major flaw in microformats. There is no source of validity. Anyone can use any thing for microformat descriptions. There is no perception of validity what so ever.

Most of the arguments for microformats, especially coming from the community tend towards ignorance of details. When you don't fully understand the details of the XML roots of XHTML, you tend to try and hack it or reinvent the wheel. Really diving into XML technology beyond XHTML sheds insight and vision on where the XML trend is moving, why, and where XHTML can follow along.

The only questionably valid arguments are for the current landscape not fully supporting XHTML+XML. However, as I have stated, that is quickly becoming a non-issue. You can also argue that XML wasn't meant to be the solution to the semantic web... but I ask, why isn't it? Tell me why a language designed to mark-up any data cannot describe the semantics of that data?