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reginaldjcooper

662 karma · joined May 27, 2013

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reginaldjcooper··on I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
So only if you help them associate all of your internet traffic with a registration. Hm, sounds privacy-conscious.
reginaldjcooper··on The Rust standard library no longer has any scheduling baked into it
thank you very much I love this stuff
reginaldjcooper··on The Rust standard library no longer has any scheduling baked into it
I was worried it might be an empirical result :) thanks for responding, though, and I'd love to see the post when it's finished
reginaldjcooper··on ObjClean
Without curly braces it is simpler to mess up if you revisit the code, maybe especially adding ambiguous else conditions.

I'm sure you and the GP would never forget to add curly braces when inserting an else, but the junior developer who comes afterwards might, and it's just not a huge deal to have the braces because it's two extra chars.

Quite frankly the Linux kernel coding style is wrong on this one in general, I guess we can assume they are experienced enough to put braces in when adding an else clause and so it's not going to cause them errors. But with junior devs it certainly could.

reginaldjcooper··on The Rust standard library no longer has any scheduling baked into it
That is really interesting. If it's not too much trouble to write out, could you explain what causes the latency difference between kernel wake-up and other thread wake-up?
reginaldjcooper··on Clojure vs. Scala
I am having an incredibly difficult time understanding why int-or-string cards are desirable also. You'd end up with multiple functions like heartsGameCardValue and euchreGameCardValue but with int cards you need to write the same thing and without a type system to catch errors. If it was truly simpler to reason in terms of int, you could also do a cardIntegerRepresentation function and it would add very little length to the codebase.
reginaldjcooper··on The real use of money is to buy freedom
Right? But the GP was asserting minimum wage is a willful transaction also. Actually if the laborers don't like their minimum wage, they cannot opt out of it either, they need to eat, pay for housing, and get medical insurance from somewhere.

It's absurd to me that someone would assert that Bill Gates is being dominated by paying taxes whereas these other people are somehow not being dominated by accepting a low wage in the same system.

Also Bill Gates has the resources to change citizenship if he thinks there's a better deal elsewhere. Many of these other people would not be financially able to move to another country and work there legally. So it's definitely more willful for him than for the minimum wage workforce.

reginaldjcooper··on Ask HN: How do I make my dating app popular?
I once read an interesting article on how OkCupid was doing question weighting wrong because people would mark matching on factual questions (like, "What is the largest of these? A. Elephant B. Whale C. The Moon") as being absolutely vital to get correct. People would then end up with like 90%+ matches with others they would not really get along with, just because of the ridiculous weighting on those questions–it became a matching system more like, "who has answered the same questions as I?"
reginaldjcooper··on Top Science Articles of 2013
This is the first time I have seen it. I like it, I see it as an antonym to whatever we call those "top ten weird science facts" posts. It signals that here is an author who is trying to take me seriously.
reginaldjcooper··on The real use of money is to buy freedom
Just what we need, some more Objectivism.

If the free market ensured that all people were given a wage that adequately reflected their value, the bottom 40% of earners would be getting more than 10% of the income.

Bill Gates paid 30 cents of every dollar in exchange for access to an educated and healthy workforce, use of the interstates for shipping, use of the police and military for protection, and use of a contract law system. Microsoft then abused its wealth to "embrace, extend, extinguish;" which is sort of a perfect illustration of how consolidating lots of money gives totally unbalanced market advantages to a few entities.

reginaldjcooper··on Dear Jailbreak Community
I just wanted to write that I like the iOS platform and devices when jailbroken, but I am also sick of their walled garden bullshit. So, cheers for standing up for your principles over your convenience, it takes a strong person to do so.
reginaldjcooper··on Dear Jailbreak Community
For many people the restrictions protect them from installing malware, and is a huge benefit. For the majority of us reading, I think we know enough to not install weird applications and the restrictions are incredibly burdensome.
reginaldjcooper··on Dear Jailbreak Community
I wish we'd collectively only buy things where the root exploit was like ticking an "I want root" checkbox. If buyers collectivized their buying power we wouldn't need to worry about "down the line" companies would release it with root or the product would fail.

Sigh. While I'm at it, I'd also like a sack full of hundreds and a unicorn.

reginaldjcooper··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
Could you go as far as messing with the carrier bundles? I had a problem a while ago where Safari would reinstall the carrier's default bookmarks every time it reopened. To be fair it was irritating, not critical, but I was able to hack the carrier bundle and remove the bookmarks, plus change the carrier name out of spite.

Stuff like that, it doesn't change my life but it makes me mildly happier, all because I can get at the filesystem and have root on my own devices.

reginaldjcooper··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
Excellent point! This is my old iPod Touch 4th Gen, I have since gotten an Android phone.
reginaldjcooper··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
It sure did make me feel better about myself. Did telling that person he was using his phone wrong make you feel better about yourself?

There wasn't even a problem. "I like f.lux." "Or you could not stare at your phone." What were that poster or third party readers supposed to have gleaned from your comment, pray tell?

reginaldjcooper··on White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts
And sex education filtering.
reginaldjcooper··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
Yes those were the two choices, jailbreak or not stare at the phone before sleep. Very perceptive, aroch.
reginaldjcooper··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
My top three:

Freedom to copy your data out of an app into your computer even if the app doesn't "allow" it. E.g., get into Notes.app's sqlite database after they decide to delete all the data when you unlink your account even if it hasn't successfully synced for a year so that you can recover half of it.

Develop apps on your own device without paying $100 and supporting the war on general purpose computing. Also compile and run GPL apps.

A caller and texter black/whitelist.

reginaldjcooper··on Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future
I'm with you on not trusting US companies, fine.

But you somehow expected tptacek to inspect and criticize Telegram with such scrutiny that he finds all of the problems pro bono? That's ridiculous.

reginaldjcooper··on Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future
If you don't think "hire people that know what they are doing with crypto" is better advice than "have a contest that doesn't even prove security under known plaintext attacks and pay out $100k to someone who finds a MITM attack to prove you're serious", you're actually not qualified to determine who the right person to determine "reasonable effort" is. I know I sound like a complete jerk, but that's just the honest truth.

The fact is that it is highly inappropriate to have a new, completely unvetted cryptographic protocol in a context where people are relying on it to provide actual security, and they are flat-out ignoring advice from talented and knowledgable people.

reginaldjcooper··on Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future
> precisely because they show how willing they are to improve their service.

Multiple people that know what they are doing have remarked that the system Telegram has created is a bad idea and it would be much better to use any established protocol. They have also pointed out multiple places where Telegram is committing obvious cryptographic blunders in their protocol.

Telegram decided to pay out $100k under contest rules that are weaker than known plaintext attacks. If they wanted to actually improve their security they would switch to a more secure protocol that doesn't require a server to actively participate in the conversation. I guess if they want to hemorrhage money via the hubris that is their crypto contest they should just keep on as they are.

reginaldjcooper··on Protesters charged with 'Terrorism Hoax' for too much glitter on their banner
Yes, well done. My one-acre homestead is indeed exactly the same as a sovereign state, it in fact changes nothing when the scale is millions of times that large. Also access to private property and state immigration are in fact the exact same concept as well.
reginaldjcooper··on Startups, please stop calling it your 'Careers' page
This was the proper response.

"Career" has become the formal version of "job" anyway. I would be wholly unsurprised if A/B testing showed that applicants for "career" are more experienced on average.

reginaldjcooper··on Shit programmers write
> When I started with Java, it seemed appropriate to put hundreds of getter / setter methods. Is there much advantage to that over allowing the variable to be accessed directly?

Oh my yes. As soon as you need more than one processor messing with an object they are invaluable. The only thing better is immutable objects.

It's also nice to have the object interface separate from object data if you want to change the object data representation without breaking everything (I don't know in general when you would do this, I just know I have done it before and getter/setters let me work faster to refactor).

reginaldjcooper··on Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers?
I like the juxtaposition of

> Anybody who uses the word "denier" to denigrate their political opponents is employing dishonest tactics that only a fool would find convincing.

and

> fake environmentalists

reginaldjcooper··on Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers?
Random changes causing a net decrease of entropy over time? That's a new one.
reginaldjcooper··on Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers?
It's a science discussion subreddit. I think "your statements must be within a standard deviation of reality as measured" is not an unreasonable requirement for posting to a scientific discussion. It actually is quite nice to have, say, young earth creationists denied a chance to show their views when you are trying to have a discussion about reality.
reginaldjcooper··on Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers?
I have no problem from banning people that refuse to accept reality from any educational or political forum. If they banned people for talking about Intelligent Design or alchemy (outside a historical context) I would say that's a feather in their cap as well.
reginaldjcooper··on I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System
Isn't it more likely to be in graffiti than via Morse coded gnome hops? I hope the NSA is getting photos of all that graffiti it sounds dangerous.
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