Hacker News Reader

quasqueon Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.

The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.

quasqueon Plain text wrapping in Gmail

This preference is based on the assumption that the extra information conveyed in the HTML part of the email is worthless, which may not be the case.

I can see from the downvotes that some HN users are excessively passionate about their plain text emails, but many people do prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide.

This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.

quasqueon Plain text wrapping in Gmail

I don't think that is a very good argument in these modern times, with the relatively huge storage and bandwidth availability. The extra size of such formatting markup is negligible.

quasqueon Plain text wrapping in Gmail

Seems a rather archaic requirement to be imposing on one's users, but thanks for clarifying!

quasqueon Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain

Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake.

In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus).

This paper has a nice review of the topic: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf

quasqueon Plain text wrapping in Gmail

The author hasn't made a case for why he needs to send plain text emails.

Every mail client - including text mode ones like Pine - supports HTML formatted emails, even if they end up displaying them without formatting.

quasqueon Jamming XKeyScore

You'd be wasting your time as there is no feedback as to whether your attempts have worked to frustrate their targeting, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that someone picks up on your efforts and casually flags you to make your life more difficult - extra searches at borders, no fly list, and so on.

quasqueon Jamming XKeyScore

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They may have stopped attacks but not revealed any information about this publicly, or engaged in misdirection as to their role using parallel construction.

quasqueon Things You Should Know About Tor

Hidden services can't be located in that manner unless the owner has badly misconfigured the service so it's reachable by IP address. A typical configuration would have the service listening on 127.0.0.1 or a private (RFC 1918) network address only, and have Tor connect to that.

quasqueon Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults

Headline should be modified to indicate that the study was carried out in the USA. It's not generally applicable to the world population, or necessarily to all high-income countries.

quasqueon Teaching creationism as scientifically valid now banned in all UK public schools

The problem with 'intelligent design' is that it's such an infantile way of trying to understand the world. Stating "God did it", rather than using one's brain to figure out the mechanisms of how the world works, is just lazy, regressive thinking that doesn't advance our knowledge and understanding in any way whatsoever.

quasqueon U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (2013)

How do you know it doesn't work? From all we've been told (very little, mostly through leaks) there isn't enough information to make that judgement.

The key issue isn't the potential benefit of mass surveillance in dealing with crimes or potential crimes, but rather its risk to individual privacy and the danger of enabling authoritarian governance.

quasqueon Teaching creationism as scientifically valid now banned in all UK public schools

It's a poorly argued essay.

The author starts from an assumption that the Bible is true and cherry-picks evidence in an attempt to support that, choosing the interpretation (or misinterpretation) that best fits into his pre-existing biases.

Not convincing unless one has already been indoctrinated into the belief that everything is 'God-given', rather than being more open-minded and inquisitive about the nature of the world.

quasqueon UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance

Oh, I agree. Just pointing out that mass surveillance may well be both helpful to national security and very damaging to human rights.

For what it's worth, I suspect it's unduly balanced towards authoritarianism as well.

quasqueon Suicidal Software Developer

You exhibit a disturbing lack of empathy.

quasqueon Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

Apparently it's any site that sells the "Datalink GW1000".

quasqueon UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance

> Your beliefs are wrong, as we have been shown that this mass surveillance has failed to prevent even one terrorist attack since its inception.

We don't actually know this. Mass surveillance may have led to 'extrajudicial' methods of thwarting terrorist attacks, i.e. death squads or drone killings. Or when cases of terrorist plots have been taken to trial, its use could have been masked by parallel construction of evidence.

This level of underhandedness seems to be increasing in recent times. For example, there is a terrorist conspiracy trial currently ongoing in the UK that is being held almost entirely in secret - the public and media are not permitted to know the evidence or the sources of evidence against the suspects. In fact up until recently even the existence of the trial and the identities of the suspects were under a gag order, for reasons unknown[1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/12/secret-terror-tri...

quasqueon UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance

I find this view rather short-sighted.

To some extent I agree with you that there are benefits to mass surveillance, and that on the whole it is (probably) not currently being widely abused.

However, this is not predictive of the future.

By setting up such a pervasive surveillance machine, this massively enables abuses by future governments that may not be quite as benign towards its citizens.

Just consider how 'useful' this mass data mining of private communications would have been for the East German Stasi, or during McCarthyism in the USA, or many other examples of overly authoritarian governance.

The danger is that a system set up to protect state security, ostensibly with the best of intentions, can be subverted later on as a tool of governmental abuse.

quasqueon UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance

Could you please elaborate on some examples of this?

quasqueon An even slimmer pdf.js

I also have this problem, but on a Windows laptop with 2GB. However, Firefox has recently been crashing several times per day, which sorted out the long-running memory problem but rather inconveniences usage.

It's a shame because I really do prefer it to the other browsers, for a variety of reasons.

quasqueon Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

She's talking about an education in computing for teenagers who will typically be sitting exams at ages 16 and 18, for GCSE and A-Level qualifications respectively - not a rant about undergraduate education, as you seem to be implying.

Here's more details on what these subjects are composed of; it's quite basic stuff: http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/ict-and-computer-science

quasqueon TrueCrypt must not die

Your explanation makes sense. Though I'm still curious as to when this happened and what the impact was.

quasqueon TrueCrypt must not die

> Linux security was significantly reduced at one point because somebody changed int i to int i=0

Could you please elaborate on this one?

quasqueon TrueCrypt suggesting migration to BitLocker?

It does appear that the authors have removed the advertising clause in this latest license version. Also the section on commercial licensing, some mentions of registered trademarks, and all specific references to the truecrypt.org domain, including email addresses.

However it's unclear if this change is only for Truecrypt 7.2 or can be applied retrospectively to previous versions. As the authors have deleted sizeable portions of the encryption code in this final version, such ambiguity could be problematic.

quasqueon TrueCrypt suggesting migration to BitLocker?

As far as I know, its license is incompatible with other open source licenses due to an advertising clause (all derivative works have to state "based on Truecrypt" somewhere in the documentation or via use of the software). The old four clause BSD license had a similar issue.

quasqueon TrueCrypt suggesting migration to BitLocker?

It may be the same strong sense of ownership and control that precluded the liberalisation of Truecrypt's license during its lifetime in the past decade.

quasqueon TrueCrypt suggesting migration to BitLocker?

It could be that they've simply lost interest in developing it. It's quite the ongoing responsibility, and they may well be tired of working on it - a decade is a long time in anyone's life.

If this is true, then perhaps such listlessness was also catalysed by the ongoing audit. Maybe seeing such a mass of crowdfunding income towards a project to pick Truecrypt apart, in contrast to the scant donations to its development, disheartened the authors towards further work?

Abandoning it in this rather dramatic way ensures that Truecrypt's users are warned against using unsupported software where any bugs will remain unfixed. This is especially important when such bugs revealed in the future (and maybe ones already known) have the possibility of being deleterious for security.

quasqueon Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

(I also misinterpreted it at first glance)

quasqueon HTTP/2.0 – Please admit defeat

Thanks for the explanation, I haven't been following the progress of SPDY so I'm not familiar with the detail. What use cases would be hindered by this new standard?

quasqueon HTTP/2.0 – Please admit defeat

Would it be accurate to suggest that the rushing of Google's SPDY, as HTTP/2.0, through IETF standardisation is roughly equivalent to the situation a few years ago when Microsoft pushed Office Open XML through as an ECMA standard? Or is that just a huge mischaracterisation?