rnovak

But the merchant pays for their merchandise in USD.

why would a merchant choose to accept this "currency", considering it's not valuable to them?

The whole point of my comment was that anecdotes are by definition not universal. Maybe you missed that?

To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings.

Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.

a simple interface that WORKS, absolutely.

I tried in February to switch to the Nexus 6P. I literally had to restart it TWICE on day one. How is that even reasonable? for 650 dollars, that's a joke.

I'll get downvoted to hell, but I really don't care, iOS just works (tm), and I'll take that over custimizibility any day of the week.

> I'm not going to dive deep into the topic of why I consider "just using standardized crypto" unsafe and prefer rolling another custom end-to-end encryption layer on top of it.

please, by all means, enlighten us.

> I'm sorry that you can't see beyond the algorithms.

Please keep in mind that you have no idea what my background is (or what experience I have), so don't assume that I "can't see beyond the algorithms".

You understand that a secure pen-drive (which is what I think you're talking about by 'pinlocked') has a HSM (Hardware Security Module) with hardware implementations of standardized encryption algorithms, right?

You literally just suggested using standardized encryption algorithms to protect your OTP key.

Or you could...you know...just use standardized crypto across the board.

OTP is by definition impractical. I'm sorry that you don't see that.

It doesn't matter.

In order for OTP to work, you first have to invent secure communication. It puts the horse before the carriage.

Oh, and now you have to maintain perfect secrecy/privacy of a 4gb file.

Solved one problem (theoretically), and now you have a multitude of practical issues.

So again, OTP is impractical.

> Let's consider we've produced exactly 4 GiB of random key data and distributed it between the two users

if you have a method of securely distributing 4gb of key, why on earth wouldn't you use that to transmit the message itself?

That's 100% impractical

You mean other than the fact that it's still running on top of a kernel, BIOS, and other firmware that was ALL written in C or Assembly? Yeah, totally safe /s.

If it was "embarassingly basic", wouldn't it have been found way sooner? not YEARS down the line, even DECADES?

Since you mention ruby: https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/89191

What was that about not having buffer overflows in "modern" languages?

I totally get that XML is intimidating, it certainly was for me for a long time, but eh...it solves more problems than it creates (at least in my professional opinion).

But... I'll be the first to admit that Java isn't the perfect tool for every problem, and I certainly feel that as engineers, we should use the proper tool to solve the problem.

Well, I don't have that much experience with Python, but by your own admission:

   packages with a C++ module normally...

Sorry, but 'normally' doesn't cut it for me (or the organizations that I work/worked for).

I can use ANY maven dependency, regardless of what JVM language it was built with, what language level (java 1.1 - 1.8) it was built with, pretty much anything.

Because with JVM languages, and their "horrid" backwards compatibility (that everyone always loves to bash), I can declare dependencies on libraries written in Java 1.1, and it will JUST WORK.

From what I understand, there's a fairly large chasm between Python 2/3 (such that a lot of people use external libraries to deal with coding cross-compatibile code, and apparently get wrong some-times).

If by the same problem you mean that you have to understand a library in order to use it properly, I guess so, but I don't see how that's unique to Java.

I don't see any difference between having to understand annotations and having to understand libstdc++ for example, or having to learn about any particular ruby gem or node package.

Every language has to deal with configuration files. Complaining because a bunch of Java developers used XML in their projects seems trite.

I think XML actually has a lot of strengths (having well-defined-types and structure for one). If the complaint is that it's worse than JSON, well...I've seen way worse than XML (ASN.1 for instance), so idk...

Well, for starters, Spring basically has eliminated XML configuration with Spring-Boot. Add a couple annotations and you're done (as in, fully done, no web.xml's, no application-contexts). (Granted, I don't really like this, from an engineering point of view, but whatever).

Also, I really wouldn't complain about Maven, as it is hands down the best dependency manager available from any language, bar maybe gem/rails (node isn't even close, since you need a c++ compiler to actually get quite a few packages). There are also enough plugins for every IDE out there to handle Maven POM's.

But if that wasn't enough, there's now Gradle. You can literally have an entire Spring/Java/Grade project that doesn't use ANY XML, but purely Annotations/DSLs.

Secondly, there's a major selection bias at play. In your own words "everything I've seen of...", sorry but your point was lost right there.

Yes. I've seen (and written) plenty of actual production Java code that doesn't use any XML configuration at all.

There are a lot of issues with Java, but XML isn't INHERENT to it.

I'm sorry, but do you just disregard overflow in your applications?

Just because software is on the web, doesn't mean it doesn't have to care about logic errors

You haven't lost anything if you haven't pirated your content (since they said they'd "put it back", as quoted from your original post).

It's an inconvenience, I'll give you that.

Unless the only time your students can access your course would have been the next 24-48hrs (which I highly doubt), you/they are not being screwed over.

You are not entitled to anything on their platform, and this seems like an honest attempt to combat piracy (which actually protects content creators such as yourself).

I'm guessing he's referring to something like TLA+, which is a "mathematical" language for formal specification/verification of software systems.

Please explain how a direct action (racism/sexism/discrimination) is even somewhat close to the indirection required for "eating a cheesburger => deforestation"?

As Bill Engval says: Evel Knievel couldn't have made that jump.

How about focus on your own ethics instead of SHAMING people for eating for christ's sake.

If you go into it as a means to an end, then yes, it probably would be a waste of time.

But....if you actually approach it as an opportunity to expose yourself to new ways to think about problems, I don't think that would ever be a waste of time.

I disagree that you'll never use C idioms in C++ or Rust, but even IF that were true, there's absolutely no way that having a better understanding of what the underlying hardware is doing is a bad thing.

In my experience (and this is only my experience/observations) it is extremely unprofessional to bring up a coworkers salary in your own negotiations, for several reasons.

Many companies still have policies against coworkers sharing salary information. Yes, this is illegal in the US, but practically speaking: it being illegal is about as effective as requiring traffic police to have a "preponderance of wrongdoing" to perform a traffic stop. It still happens near constantly, and the cost/benefit of trying to enforce these laws in most cases isn't enough to actually pursue. (if you were to try and file a cause of action against your workplace for such a violation, you would surely mark yourself to future employers as being litigious - i.e you would paint yourself as a trouble-maker, so the benefit to doing so would have to be pretty big).

Secondly, social conventions don't really provide an incentive for near-strangers (and that's what many coworkers are for much of their careers) to share salary information. Yes, game theory says everyone wins if everyone shares, but we live in a society that is super prone to being offended. I don't even think it's polite to discuss money with friends.

As other posts on HN have stressed over the years, what really gives someone power in negotiations is a "Best Alternative" or BATNA[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

> Be profoundly, intolerably nice

> I don't think this is a good behavior

Being nice/personable isn't a good behavior?

wouldn't it only fly into space if it's velocity was in that direction?

And....wouldn't it interact with everything along it's path?

I mean..it wouldn't be quantum tunneling correct? (I've only taken rudimentary physics related to standard mechanics and electricity/magnetism).

But it seems to me, since the LHC is underground, it would have a decent probability of hitting something along it's path to space, or am I way off?

I host several spring webapps myself on a $10/month VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS)

Some notes:

- Default MySQL install listens only on loopback interface, so isn't exposed to the network (and if it's not in your case, you can change that in my.cnf)

- IPTables/NFTables can be used to whitelist allowed network traffic beyond HTTP/HTTPS

- SSH should be limited to public-key auth, with root login disabled as well as password auth disabled (or you can use 2 step verification with Google Authenticator, which is pretty easy to set up)

One thing I'll note is that I don't have Tomcat exposed directly to the internet: it's only exposed through an NGINX reverse proxy.

Apache Tomcat is fairly easy to download and set up (you can download the .tar.gz from Apache's website, untar, and run the executable ./bin/startup.sh).

I'd be happy to answer any questions really re: Java/Spring

Just as an FYI since you keep bringing it up, I'm fairly sure that payment processors are absolutely liable for illegal items purchased through their gateways.

If you'd like an example, Banks won't even OPEN an account in states that have legalized recreational marijuana, simply because it's still illegal federally, and they're avoiding liability.

I just thought I'd share, since I have firsthand experience in that particular industry (online payment processing).

while I agree that the author of this piece needs to make sure they're submitting DMCA takedowns to the appropriate place, I still think that a company trying to bill themselves as an academic institution shouldn't be allowed ANY infringement.

IANAL, but DMCA applies to penalties, not to the issue of whether or not they're infringing copyright.

Though, I will note that Udemy does have a designated agent in regards to DMCA Safe Harbor, so the OP may want to check that they submitted complains the correct place:

> Via E-mail: copyright@udemy.com[1]

[1]https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/

I understand that "copyright abuse" is frowned upon. (and I'm not arguing against you, I just find what they're doing to be completely unreasonable).

But this is the exact opposite. This is a company flagrantly copying someones work without permissions.

And in ACADEMIA.

IIRC, you could be thrown out of school for plagiarism, we shouldn't disregard an academic institution doing this exact thing.

Thats not the way copyright works. If you think it is, please, let RIAA know you've stolen some records and let's see how much they charge you.

Last time I checked, users are sued for thousands of dollars per infringing instance, held up in court.

Why shouldn't that hold for a COMPANY doing it? Seems a little unreasonable to me.

Edit: and for people down-voting, please explain why?