mangeletti

Out of curiosity, I have some questions about the "luxury communism" idea (I've heard of it a few times, sometimes maybe worded differently - I picture something like the ship on Wall-E):

What leverage will people (leftists?) use to ensure access to "fully automated luxury communism"?

For instance, what if those who claim ownership of the means say "no"? Will those people use force? If so, what weapons will they use? I'm having trouble understanding how this scenario will play out exactly.

If the answer is that they will simply create the luxury communism on their own, then why haven't they done that already (it would be so cool to see something like the ship from Wall-E)? I mean, what will have changed, and through what means would such a change be forced?

Firstly, great article.

Secondly, this guy is so hilarious.

I clicked to his podcast (where he reads Wikipedia pages) at the bottom and listened to this hilarious episode https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/david-reads-wikipedia/id.... His specific style of sarcastic humor (just like the article - is there a name for this style of humor btw?) is rare and hilarious.

I wonder why this is being flagged (moved like 15 positions down in 3 minutes).

@dang - is worth looking into whether there is a pattern to the flagging of this post (i.e., IP addresses from a certain company in Cupertino, pattern of other negative Apple PR being flagged by the same users, etc.)?

This situation (upgrading server during traffic spike) is an example of why saving a $20-50/mo on hosting isn't worth it, unless it's for something non-commercial.

If you've got maybe tens of thousands of dollars of time (and money?) invested in your app, what's another $40-80/mo for better hosting (e.g., 8GB/4 cores on Digital Ocean is $80/mo), in case something like this traffic spike happens? The app reaches the top of HN, where thousands of people that use Trello, Basecamp, and/or Freshbooks (I use all 3, every day) will be frequenting, and you've lost all that revenue.

Couple notes:

1. You're talking about a pop-up / new tab that somebody clicked while already on an attack site...

2. then loading google.com in this pop-up / new tab and, waiting a few seconds, and then changing the location of the pop-up / new tab

The vulnerability in question consists of landing up on google.com, logging in while still on google.com, then google.com sending you directly to an attack site after you finish logging in.

The user could come from an official looking email (a known and largely unavoidable problem), or from a link that somebody pasted (e.g. "click here to view my spreadsheet on Google Sheets") into a comment on a different trusted site. The "trusted site" is important to note, because as you might have deduced, no scripts or malicious intent is required on the part of the other site; just a link. In your example, the other site would have to either A) be compromised itself, to facilitate the script, or B) malicious itself.

Which of the workflows would you be more likely to fall for, your example or mine?

More people see Google ads than any other form of interaction with Google, by a long shot.

If you want to talk about Google search, it's obvious, as a user, that when you click a link in the results you're going to be going to the URL that the link points to (even if Google changes the URL when you click it for tracking purposes, there shouldn't be much room for confusion).

> Serious vulnerabilities include remote code execution...

I just meant "serious" in the general sense of the word, like the way that a bullet would in the stomach is serious, even though one in the head is more serious.

> Google's core functionality is redirecting users to third party websites

I'm pretty sure that Google's core functionality is ads, which don't require the user to actually be actually visiting pages Google.

Pertaining using Google for social auth, the user is actually expecting to go back to the site they just came from, whereas when they login to update their credit card they're logging in to stay on Google, which means that a page that looks exactly like Google...

How long this functionality remains on the site will be a better indicator. My guess is not long, esp after the publicity.

Steps:

    1. Send email that looks
       like it's from AdWords,
       claiming the user's CC
       needs to be updated

    2. User logs into Google
       after verifying URL is
       in fact google.com

    3. Google literally sends
       trusting user to attack
       site... to enter their
       credit card number

How is this not a serious vulnerability?

I think the reason for this is that this is the "please don't take the 13 thousand million dollars I owe" response letter from Apple, which probably disgusts a lot of people.

I would like to digress for a moment.

When I read things like the TL;DR of that article I get the feeling the tech industry is full of entitled children who are playing imaginary. No product, no orders, no revenue, no resources... isn't that usually just called no company?

Why do tech "startups" delude themselves into thinking that a group of guys and/or gals is something other than a group of guys and/or gals?

Can you imagine going down to your local shopping plaza, and there is this guy standing outside of an empty building, holding a big cardboard sign that reads:

    This behind me is supposed to
    be my store. It's supposed to
    have groceries and other stuff.
    But, we don't have any money
    or customers, or a store, or
    any groceries. We have a name
    though... and a logo :)

You probably can't imagine seeing that, because that person would be entirely delusional.

The minds and endocrine systems of children that at raised in safe and sterile environments, under the constant, close attention of guardians, are necessarily unprepared for the randomn inputs available in nature and society.

Children that grow up this way will be better suited for a virtual life, where the number of variables is controlled.

I wonder if the original HN "Heroku is Dead..." title will cost Heroku money / market share in indirect ways.

When I see titles like that (despite the fact that it was intended as sarcasm), I think to myself, e.g., "I bet at least hundreds of people who scrolled past it thought it was sincere, and now they will have this subconscious 'Heroku is Dead... Docker...' thought at times when deploying projects. Maybe they'll even check out Docker. Maybe these hundreds of people will represent a tipping point of sorts for Heroku->Docker migrations, because one of them will write a really great blog post about it, and it will receive thousands of views..." (alternate endings of the same thought continue to be brute-forced for a few moments).

Along the same vein of thinking, back in 2008 I had this "realization" that Google could control the world by simply showing results based on headline titles (e.g., a search for "Obama" during the election could have resulted in articles / results whose titles have words/phrases whose presences are positively correlated to lower or higher stress levels, assumptions, other emotions, etc., resulting in a net positive or negative sentiment, respectively, about the subject of the search query, all while simply scanning the results to determine which one to click).

Is it just me, or is Tumblr's UX absolutely terrible?

You reach the bottom and it says "keep reading". Keep reading what, the last post in the list or pagination to more posts? So I click it, takes me to the last post (fine), so I scroll down to look at some of the pictures, etc., and then at the bottom it seems to continue back at the top of the prior post list. So I go back, scroll back down to the bottom of the page and notice a "See mcmansionhell's whole Tumblr" link. Perfect. I click it... App Store.

I that grant was for Channels integration, which has been postponed until at least the next release.

Just some quick numbers:

$585,000 comes out to 0.1778116% (almost two tenths of one percent) of Mozilla's 2015 revenue of $329,000,000.

As an avid Firefox user since 2007, upon learning a few years ago how much revenue Mozilla takes in, I've always wondered where the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent... I was talking with a colleague about Servo, and was saying, "If they spent allocated 5% of that revenue on Servo, they could hire 70 developers year round at $235,000 each to work on Servo full time, year-round."

Kay compares the iPhone, et al to "selling sugar water to children" in an attempt to relegate them to "consumer gadget" status... compared to what, enterprise gadgets?

What do you mean by "write with a superposition of all letters at once"?

For others:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/django-admin/#cmdo...

And on the flip side... they didn't have nukes, so they used all that artillery.

Exactly[1].

The moment I saw this project start, the first thing I thought was, "Isn't this how all terrible things are created, by trying to avoid having them be created?".

I wonder if the long-term strategy will be called Mutually-Assured Obsolescence™.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)

Can you paste an example specification for a small program?

I use a whiteboard (or paper), as do many others, to diagram things out, as a means to put a program's abstract form into my brain. That whiteboard doesn't contain the entire program.

> ... and have tests, I'd highly recommend you use them...

Absolutely, but that's not TDD.

The old tests (presumably) were written as regression tests, and code changes must comply to the (hence) regression tests' expectations. That's perfectly reasonable, and I think that's most tested software projects operate.

> If you have a specification...

A specification doesn't translate directly into code. Otherwise, developers wouldn't have jobs. A specification is interpreted by developers, then reinterpreted by other developers, managers, etc., then updated, etc.

TBH, I don't know anyone who does TDD. I only know a few handfuls of developers, but so far the only people I've briefly met that do TDD were ones selling it; the consulting company that came into the company I worked for.

This consulting company tried to "teach" us TDD at the same time as I think they were learning it. Not a single developer out of the ~40 on our teams bought into it, because in almost all cases the code for a given example (during these 90 minute seminars) was always more confusing and obfuscated, and the unit tests didn't truly match the business case, because TDD is a bit like waterfall, in the sense that you're assuming you know what the code needs to do before you write it (how many times, especially for a large project, does your code change before you finish and are ready to write tests?).

After the 3 months of consulting, they left us and we continued on writing code and unit tests (in that order) just as we had before.

I think that TDD changes your code for the worse, except in very small, controlled cases. For e.g., a large web app, I think it just creates a mess.

If you think of all unit tests as regression tests, you'll have a good time.

Considering their code is licensed under Apache 2.0, you could do that yourself, if that's what you think is the right thing to do.

I don't see anything wrong with Minio writing a blog post to show off something neat they did.

Also, considering how ubiquitous both hashing and ARM have become, 100x is a pretty valuable speedup.

Absolutely terrific advice.

As soon as I read "_specific_ feedback", my eyes lit up.

Another issue with specific feedback is that "...should be red instead of blue" type feedback can derail a designers whole thought process, a thought process which usually doesn't end at the delivery of a draft, which is merely an optional stop along the way in the mind of the designer.

A designer might have ideas for how to address certain kinds of objections to a draft. For example, if boss says, "It doesn't match our brand well enough.", the designer might have some specific ideas that he/she came up with, in case that was a perceived issue. If, instead, the boss says, "It doesn't match our brand well enough, so add more blue.", then the designer's route can no longer be used, and an entirely new route has to be determined.

I use the railway analogy, because I think it actually maps exactly: Imagine you, as a train passenger, told the conductor (the person you've hired to be your railway professional) exactly where to go, and there wasn't a predefined switch for getting there OR the switch for getting to that exact location has already been passed. The only way to achieve this new route is to backtrack or build a new switch track, both of which are more expensive than continuing on the existing route to a location that also solves the passenger's problems.

Hey, have a great weekend, and relax a little.

TBH, this is what happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force haha. I saw the rest of your comment above now, and I realize (please bear in mind, I was typing on my phone while walking through noisy Praha, after some wine) that I was thinking of getattr while I was typing that. I also scrolled up to realize the bug you mentioned (re: returning the sentinel value). Also, my gratuitous use of the misspelled "SENTINAL".

Despite our alpha mentalities, we are not worlds apart, truthfully. My original response came across sounding hardliner pro-try-except, anti-anything-else, but my point was only that people abuse exception handling in their primary business code (e.g., directly handling a network IOError in a Django view). As a result, they have a bad time. Libraries and utils should be relegated to exception handling duties like that. When following principles like developers love Python's try / except blocks for their clarity.

I don't have time to read your reply yet, for the same reason I didn't have time to waste on typos, etc., because I'm on my phone (traveling through Europe, no notebook), but it's clear your ego is preceding you, and thus you won't learn from my comment anyway. The others that upvoted me did.

I don't know what typo my first example has (the bug you mentioned), but the point is to teach you about the value of using try/except in abstraction, rather than littered throughout your code.