namelost

995 karma · joined August 30, 2017

nameloston Draft of new Latin-based Kazakh alphabet revealed

No doubt, but the academics who designed this alphabet definitely can write Arabic, and the letter W was going spare anyway.

nameloston I recommend against using biometric identification

https://www.xkcd.com/538/ applies.

Neither Touch ID nor passwords keep determined intruders out. If someone really wants to know what's on your phone, they will arrest/kidnap you and threaten you with prison/violence.

nameloston JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says Bitcoin is a fraud that will eventually blow up

Not quite, legal tender means if someone owes you money, you have to accept it.

nameloston Draft of new Latin-based Kazakh alphabet revealed

W for У is natural because that's how it works in Arabic.

nameloston Nano ID: A tiny, secure URL-friendly unique string ID generator for JavaScript

UUIDs are not secure unless they are version 4 (random) and generated from a secure randomness source.

nameloston Photographer wins 'monkey selfie' legal fight

If you use a computer to generate songs, there is no creative act, and no copyright.

If you copy a song someone else generated with a computer, there is no creative act, and no copyright.

If you independently write a song, and a computer independently creates an identical song, there is a creative act, and you own the copyright to the song you created (but the song the computer created is in the public domain).

If two people independently write the same song, then they both own the copyrights to their respective songs.

nameloston Messenger.com Now 50% Converted to Reason

Many people around these parts reject software patents as immoral, because software is just applied mathematics and mathematics should not be patentable.

So yes, any use of a software patent offensively is malicious.

nameloston Introducing Pytorch for fast.ai

There's nothing wrong with that, but the mathematical background really isn't that complicated. It's just linear algebra and calculus.

nameloston JavaScript: The Curious Case of null >= 0

It's not so much dynamic typing, but a lack of typing. Dynamic typing means that type checks are made at runtime.

e.g. in Ruby:

    irb> nil >= 0
    NoMethodError: undefined method `>=' for nil:NilClass

and Python 3:

    >>> None >= 0
    TypeError: '>=' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'int'

Obviously JS (and Python 2!) get this wrong, but to be fair JS was designed in the 90s.

nameloston Chinese Man Sentenced to Prison for Selling VPN Software

Do you really think that China is capable of an easy and bloodless transition to a democratic system?

Perhaps Chinese people know better than anyone just how violent revolution can be.

nameloston HSBC is killing my business, piece by piece

Presumably HSBC objects to a for-profit business running a patreon & donations. I can see how from a bank's perspective that could look like something illegal is going on.

nameloston China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

I'd disagree. What Bitcoin fans want is "digital gold", not the gold standard.

The gold standard is a system where paper currency is backed by a guarantee that it is redeemable for a given amount of gold. Of course the govt can rescind this promise at any time.

What Bitcoin fans want is something more akin to gold coins, where the value of the currency is independent of any state.

nameloston UK survey: 40% of respondents pay more than 50% of their incomes on rent

Wouldn't you rather have parks and green space inside cities, than wrapped around them? Green belts create an artificial pressure to turn green space inside cities into residential and commercial land.

The green belts are a scam. They claim to protect something that doesn't need protecting (England is dominated by rural land that is not part of a green belt), at the cost of something that does (the quality of life for those inside the cities).

nameloston UK survey: 40% of respondents pay more than 50% of their incomes on rent

The green belts need to go. Cities should be allowed to expand outwards.

nameloston [dead]

http://jennifermarohasy.com/about/

> In September 2015, I was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) – I had previously worked at the IPA from July 2003 to the end of 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Public_Affairs#Do...

> The IPA funded by its membership which include both private individuals and businesses. Among these businesses are ExxonMobil, Telstra, WMC Resources, BHP Billiton, Phillip Morris, Murray Irrigation Limited, and Visy Industries.

nameloston Deploying a global, private CDN

21 fucking years ago.

> In 1996, Dobbertin announced a collision of the compression function of MD5 (Dobbertin, 1996). While this was not an attack on the full MD5 hash function, it was close enough for cryptographers to recommend switching to a replacement, such as SHA-1 or RIPEMD-160.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#History_and_cryptanalysis