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krf

149 karma · joined November 6, 2009

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krf··on Russian court accidentally confirmed Russian military presence in Ukraine
Perhaps the comment was edited, but there is no wording in the current post that states battlegroups are in Iceland just that Iceland contributes to battlegroups in other countries.
krf··on Amazon has 150M Prime members
Not sure if it is an option for you, but I've resorted to using a PO box for these cases. So far, everything seems to be able to be shipped to the PO box address when a locker won't do.
krf··on Open source FLoydHub for launching ML jobs
The picture is of the late Edwin Jaynes, author of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
krf··on Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data
It only left in terms of attention from startups I suppose. I also disagree with the reason the article suggested - SQL could not handle the loads. My opinion is that startups simply liked the idea of not having a schema as it fit their agile approach. So, they went NoSQL because it allowed them to get going faster and change easier.
krf··on Alibaba Cloud
Maybe the $300 new user credit or $30/year SSD cloud server is new. Probably not too many people knew about these things even if they weren't. Always fun to play around with something different at low or no cost. I actually didn't see too much excitement in the comments!!!
krf··on NASA's last original Voyager engineer retires at 80
Salaries for those with low-level systems programming skills will go up, and that should get people motivated to learn what is necessary.
krf··on Rackspace CDN and other services unreachable
I called Rackspace and the rep said it was a DDOS attack.
krf··on Show HN: Example implementation of Mozilla's persona and Go server
I'm new to Go but shouldn't the defer rawResp.Body.Close() be done after the error checking. If there is an error wouldn't rawResp be nil ?
krf··on Web programs written in C++ are no big deal
qDecoder by Seungyoung Kim (www.qdecoder.org) is a terrific open source library for using CGI with C and C++.

A lot of us did what this article mentioned - but probably in the 1990s when desktop programmers were moving to the web. Most probably settled on Perl after trying C and finding development was much faster with Perl.

krf··on Ask HN: What SSL Cert Provider Do You Use?
Can you back your assertion up with some evidence ?

"Seals" used to be quite popular some years ago (e.g. TrustE seal and the BBB Seal), but they seem to get less press these days, so I wonder how important they are for conversions.

Has Aunt Millie really heard of Verisign ? May actually have heard of GoDaddy though due to the advertising.

krf··on Ask HN: Hosting personal site on a VPS, or in the cloud?
Who/what is EY ?
krf··on The $105 Fix That Could Protect You From Copyright-Troll Lawsuits
The Writer's Guild offers a script registration service to help with proving authorship of scripts, and there are for-profit services too: www.protectrite.com and www.nrs-online.com (there are probably others, but I am involved with NRS so I know that one, and ProtectRite has been around probably the longest).
krf··on Are you Mensa smart? Take the quiz
You don't need to take a Mensa test to join Mensa. If you have already done very well on a past GRE, LSAT or other accepted test then you can also qualify. Perhaps your old IQ exam results are already sufficient to join. The Mensa site has details on accepted exams and necessary scores. I got in with my old GRE exam results.
krf··on Microsoft Buying Adobe?
They have thought about - MS tried to buy Yahoo. Didn't work - not too many other alternatives - maybe they'll try again. Don't forget also that MS owns a chunk of Facebook. MS is starting to go big on the cloud too, so they are getting into position slowly but surely for the future...
krf··on How Can You Tell If A CEO Is Lying?
That joke has also been successfully applied to lawyers.
krf··on Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing
One way to beat Amazon is to make cloud development easier. I think they will do that. IMHO, Microsoft does make good development environments. People will pay for ease of use.

Another way is for Microsoft to do a great job of selling the cloud to its enormous client and developer base. I think they can do that. I suspect, but don't know, that most corporations would be happier with Microsoft behind their cloud than Amazon. A lot of corporations will have 10+ year relationships with Microsoft and/or its resellers, certified developers, etc. Amazon to them is an online store.

I think Microsoft has a great chance.

krf··on Ask HN: Learning Engineering
MIT OpenCourseWare - ocw.mit.edu - has a lot of engineering courses.
krf··on First, let's kill all the angels: Congress takes aim.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Oracle and all other large tech corporations benefit if the money to startups is cut off or diminished.

Getting rid of potential competition through legislation is a tried and true method.

krf··on ASK HN: From lit major to Computer Science Masters?
Check out this one:

University of Chicago - http://masters.cs.uchicago.edu/

If U of Chicago is doing it, likely there are others. I would also suggest looking at UK universities - the 1 year taught course Master's degree is a popular cash cow for many universities.

krf··on The Masculine Mystique
I think the article meant to say that 43.3% of women were in the labor force in 1970, and 55.8% of women today are in the labor force.
krf··on Why Perl Lost It
If mod_perl had been easy to use then I think Perl would not have lost much ground to PHP. PHP solved a particular problem back then - people wanted an interpreter embedded in Apache for better performance. PHP made it simple, mod_perl didn't.
krf··on If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
One option would be to, in your free time, get involved in an open source project that uses the new language. Additionally, that might also help build your reputation and resume quality experience.
krf··on Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
I have a hard time believing that an individual or partnership without limited liability has a similar ability as a corporation to accumulate and hold assets (unless they have a corrupt government protecting them).

The risks of operating without limited liability are rather high. The ability to issue shares to millions of people is also rather powerful. The corporation is a massive government subsidy to anyone who wants to manage a legal entity with limited liability, and the ability to raise funds in a big way.

Managing a partnership or any non-government created entity with thousands if not millions of partners is quite difficult.

Contracts cannot provide the same limited liability that the government can.

Simple example: if the driver of a car for a partnership runs over and kills someone in the course of his job -- contracts won't stop the family of the killed person from going after the assets of the natural persons of the partnership. With corporations it would be more impossible to go after shareholder assets.

Limited liability is huge; without it, lawyers would find many ways to get to assets that they can't now.

Also, contracts are not much to hide behind as compared to the government. Contracts can be busted, interpreted in unusual ways, etc. The limited liability offered by the government to shareholders is rather fool-proof.

krf··on Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
IMHO, the root problem is the corporate entity, which is a creation of the State, and not a necessary aspect of capitalism.

The nature of the corporate entity is a problem that capitalists (including Rand) like to avoid discussing. Limited liability naturally results in risk taking. What do people expect with limited liability ??? If the shareholders were actually liable for the obligations of the corporation, I think companies would be more careful.

IMHO, only natural persons and partnerships of natural persons, without limited liability, should be legal entities. Getting rid of corporate "shares" also makes it harder to accumulate massive assets...partnerships get tough to deal with when you have lots of partners.