jwiley

I find myself thinking this, from time to time. It's easy to look at a mixed-martial arts fighter, or coal miner, or sweat-shop textile factory worker, or a drug dealer and say: "why not do something less dangerous?"

But the reality is that for many people a safe career is not an easy or even realistic choice. If your options are to live in a ramshackle apartment, never own a car, not have enough money to get married, send your kids to school, bury your family members, or retire, it's harder to turn down a more lucrative and more dangerous career.

I can't pretend to know the motivations of all of the workers, but I am sure that at least some of them made the decision to sacrifice personal health and safety for their future, and their families future, which I think is a reasonable definition of heroism.

Frank Herbert seemed to like it...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5458417/new-evidence-that-frank-herbe...

Good points...I threw out copyright law when trademark is the better terminology

I think that unfortunately this was a foregone conclusion. Copyright law, like most other laws in our society, favor corporate interests.

I support his stand on principal, however. Azer is a talented developer and has an impressive life story, and has certainly contributed more to society than a social network well know for invading children's privacy.

https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-owe-my-career-to-an-iraqi-imm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_Messenger#Controversies

During the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, I was working at a super-market. One of the guys stocking shelves was a software engineer laid off by a large company after 40 years. The management at Winn Dixie put him stacking boxes in the freezer section...since they knew he needed the money and wouldn't quit.

Maybe he deserved to get fired, maybe he didn't. The lesson to me that has been reinforced over my career in the tech sector is: don't ever expect a company to value you more than the next quarters earnings reports.

I'm sorry I gave you the impression I hate Apple, thats certainly not what I intended.

One of the implicit ideas underlying Apple's arguments is that they are more trustworthy than the government.

But theres a lot of evidence that they are not as strong on privacy as they should be. Casting Apple, and private industry in general as privacy heros does a disservice to those very valid concerns.

Heres an article from earlier this month:

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-... http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/09/16/apple-rel...

I think what's being lost in the shuffle is Apple has no credibility in claiming its protecting your privacy and security.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/18/technology/security/apple-pr...

So only Apple has the ability to do this...not the US government. So we trust Apple but not USG?

You know that opening a Poke Ball releases a tremendous amount of energy, because on television they show a big flash of light. Imagine if you could open a thousand poke balls every second. We call that fusion.

What MIT did was make it easier to open all these poke balls in a sustained way. This is important because once fusion is sorted out, our political leaders like Ted Cruz could use all that energy to do really interesting things.

One side effect is that a lot of poke monsters will be released as well, which could cause problems...and so we as a society need to think about the long term ramifications.

I second that emotion. I inherited an entire ecommerce platform built around Yahoo Store's proprietary RHTML language. The only documentation was a single comment:

"RHTML turing complete?"

I never did find out the answer to that, because I only lasted one month at the job. I'm sure it was a great learning exercise / psychotic breakdown for the original author.

I haven't created large amounts of C/C++, so I'm certainly not an expert, but I was impressed by how well the source was commented and structured. Nice to see well documented, well thought out code, congrats

Ahh, I get it, he seems to have written a dialect of Lisp that powers hacker news and contributed to ycombinator.

Meg Whitman's 2014 compensation was 19.6 million, which is exactly 200 times your Dad's salary.

My 1.5 cents: probably coincidence. It would be difficult to get naval vessels to follow him around the world, for example during his trip to land-locked Mongolia:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/photogallery/vic...

No idea or visibility into Steam's backend. Hope to god they are not using C for this very reason. Great for games, terrible for SAS

I have no experience with compose.io, but will recommend object rocket / rackspace for mongo hosting. Great support, reasonable prices (as reasonable as mongo can be)

I like Zed, and appreciate his open source work and his programming books. I think he let himself get a little carried away.

"Taking criticism in stride is just part of quality, and trying to eliminate any criticism of your ideas is a sign of both immaturity and abuse of power."

http://zedshaw.com/2015/04/05/and-then-you-have-no-taste/

Can you go into details about why a financial organization requested this?

Imagine if you build a platform around Stripe payments, and then having to rip it out and go with something else. If that's the case, five days is essentially overnight, if you have retask developers/hire contractors or do it yourself.

I have no idea what kind of transactions he was performing, and whether cutting him off is ultimately justified. What's concerning is a TOS agreement that provides no means of arbitration, with notice comes via an email (what happens if this goes in the spam filter?).

Thanks for your work on Rust, a very cool language. And although the massive 3k poem was removed Rust-created binaries, and it initially pissed me off when I discovered it, thanks to Brian Anderson for sharing.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/13871

Struggling to connect the lines of your reasoning. You say these are money laundering tax shelters, and that the poorest members of society pay far more than the foreign billionaires who own them and make money trading them around.

But that's all irrelevant and somehow the article is overblown FUD? Is the point that all the lawyers and construction jobs outweigh taxes? I think the fundamental argument is one of fairness, the people who benefit the most from a wonderful city should pay their share to maintain and support it.

Formal verification would not help if the formal or informal design specs called for unauthenticated telnet. It would prove that the entire stack was bullet-proof against memory violations and mathematically pure, and that it would with 100% certainty allow untrusted users to access administrative functions.

My rant was about a cultural trend in the US of demonizing politicians for being educated and/or intellectual. FoxNews has worked hard to become a mouth-piece for this viewpoint.

I wasn't commenting on his political views, party, or human rights background, which I know nothing about.

Wonder if you have FoxNews or a similar variant in Singapore? Do they characterize the Prime Minister as a professorial egg-head elitist out of touch with the common man?

If not you have something to look forward to, in the early days of our republic, we generally appreciated educated statesmen. Now we prefer our elected officials to be fun-loving guys next door who see the internet as a system of tubes.

Lots of tabs are a hint you are time-slicing too finely, IMHO. If I have more than a manageable number, it's a little hint to myself that I'm getting spread too thin to make any sort of reasonable progress on anything.

This is lovely, congrats to the author

assert(rand() != dummy_random_read_phony())

Signed extensions also seem like a nice addition

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...

It would be helpful to have real-world examples of who is losing out due to this and why...beyond the entire free peoples of the internet (some of whom I'm sure do not use linked in).

Can someone point me to an explanation of "Nim is the only language that leverages automated proof technology to perform a disjoint check for your parallel code"? This is mentioned prominently on the main page...but scanning the docs, the FAQ, Dr. Dobbs, and Googling 'nim disjoint' didnt lead me to a detailed explanation.