rnovak

I get that this is an unpopular opinion, but why does all of society have to have the same priority?

As a computer engineer, the likelihood of me contributing to a 'cure for <x>', is very very low. I'd like to focus on things that I can solve, or work towards.

So telling people to stop trying to solve something (that is an actual problem), because something else should be a higher priority.....seems kind of ridiculous.

As for attributing terrorism to "modern life", I think that's a joke. We should just ACCEPT mass murder?

Also, people DON'T accept car deaths, there are huge segments of the population working towards reducing car deaths (that's kind of the whole point behind autonomous cars, as I understand it).

Well, considering I'm in the IT/CS group and I don't use those tools, the idea that "everyone" uses them is demonstrably false.

Secondly, the fact that it's the most probable explanation of the link between facebook/dating sites, and it hasn't been mentioned yet....clearly they're not that popular.

Finally, can people stop thinking that the way they use the internet is the same way everyone does? That's so far from reality it's not funny.

You don't even have to, all you have to do is visit both sites from the same browser, and they can use the ad-network cookies to track you.

Have you not heard of the Facebook ad network? Are you under the impression your dating site doesn't advertise?

"how is this possible?"? That's been obvious for a while now. They track you. Everywhere. Same with google.

Two questions (not trying to be argumentative or snarky):

> we like using randomly generated identifiers.

Why? Why do your identifiers need to be cryptographically secure at all? Why do they even need to be random? Unless you're using them AS KEYS (your use of Math.random() suggests you aren't), "cryptographically secure" doesn't even have a valid context.

It seems like UNIQUE would suffice, which brings me to:

> Researching a good UUID library and maintaining a dependency is harder than vetting the 10 lines of code required to do it yourself

Well.....except that if you had done the former, you wouldn't have had to analyze collisions because, you know, they wouldn't have happened.

And if you're not using identifiers AS KEYS (which would be horrible practice anyway, since it's apparently output to the logs), why does the library need to be kept "up to date"? Seems as long as its generating unique id's, you're good to go.

Also, I don't understand, if you're using Node.JS and server side javascript, why couldn't you just build a dead simple add-on/module in C++ that makes a direct call to libuuid? (and by using a dylib, that would stay up to date as long as you patch your servers).

I mean the math was definitely an interesting read, but it seems like it was all for naught.

Again, I didn't want to come off as rude or anything, I just happen to agree with the top level comment.

Unless you have security clearance, most likely above top secret, you have no clue what happens (and if you did, commenting on it in a public forum would most likely be a federal crime).

We already know there are secret courts that hear secret arguments that can't be refuted by defendants/targets. Oh, and if that court involved you, you're legally not even allowed to tell anyone.

We already know that the NSA/FBI/CIA/DEA uses parallel construction to actually prosecute crimes against US citizens.

How do we know this stuff? Someone with clearance risked his life, and gave up his freedom to tell the world. Oh, and the US said they MIGHT NOT waterboard him if he ever came back to the US to face his crimes.

And out of the thousands of documents he had, how many do we have access to? A few handful?

Sure...we know everything </sarcasm (as if you couldn't tell)>

I don't have a burden of proof because I have nothing to prove, I'm not making a claim one way or another.

The person I was commenting to, however, IS making a claim. Maybe your burden of proof applies to him?

What incentive is that? The only people they have to prove their worth to are the people that have the power to shut them down.

We as a society do not have that power, and that should be obvious by now.

When a court decided what they were doing was illegal, less than a day later (probably the fastest anything has EVER happen in the legal system), another bench decided that what the NSA was doing was TOO BIG TO STOP. Like seriously, their argument for not stopping something UNCONSTITUTIONAL was that they were doing too much of it.

You and I, and every other civilian who actually understands what they're doing have ZERO power to stop them, so they have ZERO incentive to convince US what matters.

You know who they DO have to convince? The exact people that keep voting to KEEP THEM IN POWER.

I don't care what Obama and his administration claims, like I said, they have no incentive to prove anything to the American public.

Not entirely, it's more of the "that word 'proof'/'proves' doesn't mean what you think it means" argument.

My point is entirely aimed at the linguistic use of "proves" than anything else.

The only thing that can prove or disprove anything is the abundance of information, which we don't have.

We have no idea how many attacks have been prevented (everyone likes to claim this is zero....but they do so without any evidence to support that, as relevant information is surely classified beyond Top Secret).

We have only the slightest, tiniest, smallest idea of what the NSA and other intelligence organizations are capable of.

British intelligence took how long to tell people that they cracked enigma? 50 years?

Out of the THOUSANDS of documents that Edward Snowden leaked to reporters, the public has access to what? on the order of 50?

Yeah....we know nothing...so saying one way or the other is kind of ridiculous at this point.

This is probably going to get super downvoted, possibly flagged, but what evidence does anyone have that they could not have stopped it?

I think it's PLAUSIBLE that the intelligence community knew and identified this attack ahead of time, and chose to ignore it.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me (let's be clear here: I'm not saying they caused it, I'm saying they knew and chose to do nothing).

That move 'The Imitation Game' raised a good point: If you have the ability to read 100% of your enemies comms...what's the best approach for defeating them?

The second you stop 100% of every attack you know about, the jig would be up, they'd know that their comms had been compromised, they'd switch to a different technology, and you'd be on the defensive (instead of offensive).

It's not like we'd even know how many they stopped, I'm sure that material is so classified not even analysts have access to it, let alone would it be open to FOIA requests.

Anyway, just a thought.

Where in the post did it say it was running on windows? It was stated that the User Agent string wasn't identifiable, nor did it send any identifiable headers.

edit: thanks for the clarification, I totally missed the file name

Your original comment was a top level comment on the article, and is verbatim:

> If we want to have a reasonable discussion about this

The "this" in that sentence (to any reasonable human) would mean that you were talking about the subject of the article, the people that got their money seized, not "in general asset forfeiture".

So no....not a red herring.

If you wanted to be careful, your first statement should read: "if we want to have a discussion about asset forfeiture...".

Except that if you had read the article, only $140,000 of the defendants money was "allegedly ill-gotten", meaning the government seized ALL of their money, not just the allegedly illegal money.

Your #2 is a non-starter because #1 is flawed.

You only have rights as long as your government is willing to respect them. For this purpose, bestowing a right and not taking it away are exactly the same (and you acknowledge below that a government can "take away" rights).

Secondly, a "right" is a human concept, born of human logic. It is not natural, the Universe & Reality doesn't care one way or another what "rights" humans have.

Generally I take a "Trust, but Verify" approach to most everything, and luckily, modern browsers have a nifty "search google for..." context menu option that lets me check anything that I highlight out on google (what a wonderful world), so the second I right clicked on what was highlighted the 'hidden' content was revealed.

There are a lot of people on HN, and a lot of people with downvote privilege, and there are a lot of people who just generally downvote because they disagree with something.

Even if your opinion is completely positive, if people disagree, and a lot of people see it, you will get downvoted just because they disagree (and no one will reply to your comment to disagree, it's a drive-by-downvote).

There's also verification of this by HN mods: Several comment threads exist where they keep increasing the downvote threshold (from 300, to 400, to 500, and beyond). But it still doesn't solve the problem.

you mean except for all of the companies that are bootstraped, and never take a dime from venture capital, right?

I don't think that the lack of a "grass roots movement" implies a lack of caring (on any groups part, but specifically "geeks").

Also, I don't think the lack of startups in the (pardon the buzzwords) "sustainability space" implies that tech people don't care.

Maybe the tech people that do care work for established companies in that industry?

Maybe there are constraints that make it extremely hard for a startup to (again, pardon the buzzwords) "gain traction" in the industry, i.e. companies that already have huge market share, overbearing regulations, etc.

idk, I just think it's a little premature to think that "geeks" don't care about renewability/climate change just because there aren't a ton of tech specific startups trying to solve it.

There are tons of companies that don't list themselves on Product Hunt, etc.

There are tons of engineers that don't use twitter (and that's not specific to engineers).

Why wouldn't it be easier?

Someone who has more discretionary income can take on more risk than someone who can't keep their lights on, and a failed venture doesn't have the same consequences.

Just by virtue of taking more risk, those in the middle class are expanding their chance of success by orders of magnitude more.

I'd dare say it's impossible for the middle class to not to become "mega rich" at a greater incidence than poor becoming middle class.

If you want something that runs linux well (I currently have Cent OS running on mine, and it comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu), I'd say System 76 is a pretty good choice. Their 15.6" version is pretty beefy ($1400 base), but even their 14" model looks good right now ($800 base). The model I use is a few years old, and is holding up really well. They have native drivers for pretty much everything, even the hardware switches are supported through the BIOS if I remember correctly, so when I loaded up other distros, nothing was a problem.

Windows pretty much runs on everything, but my work computer is a Lenovo/ThinkPad T540P. It's base is $800, but the version I'm running is optioned out to about $1500-1800 I think (Core i7 (4 core), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). Great computer, I've had about 14 vm's running in VirtualBox running on it at once before memory started becoming a problem (again, with the optioned out specs). (also, I run Windows 7 Enterprise on this, so may be YMMV with Windows 10).

both of those are superb, though I guess neither really competes build-quality wise with my 15" Macbook Pro Retina. I end up using that for almost anything that I don't need the GNU C/C++ toolchain for, which ends up being most stuff anyway.

So, I'll give you my thoughts, and maybe some advice, but please take it with a grain of salt. Some of your comments say your in the Chicago area, and I definitely live in a different part of the country, so don't feel like I'm trying to say my experience is universal.

I want to disclaim that while some companies may say a degree is necessary, there are very few that actually enforce that. I've had several offers in principle (as in a written offer was extended) well before I had a degree, and from companies most probably wouldn't believe. While it's definitely harder to get in the door, it's likely not impossible.

However I'd also like to point out that as you may have read from several comment threads, the majority of a software-developers life doesn't revolve around Computer Science. I mean the last time I really had to consider whether something was Turing complete was, well, it was in hardware development, but that's beside the point.

There are many aspects of programming that aren't taught in CS books. Decomposing requirements, process & methodology, and so many others. I've read a lot of people say that when they interview, they look for fit.

So, with that in mind, I'd suggest stepping away from trying to show off just your CS chops, but actually solve interesting problems to you. It's sort of funny to me, because your headline sort of describes open source software. For me, contributing to open source allows me to write software that I'm actually passionate about, instead of just solving interesting problems for a company that I'm kind of ambivalent about.

As far as getting your foot actually in the door, I'd suggest looking for "software tester" positions. They are usually the low man on the totem pole, but they are the definition of a foot in the door. I'm sure some people disagree, but I've worked with several people who completely lacked a formal education, but started as a software tester somewhere, and worked their way up. Most of them, instead of just finding bugs & problems, would dig into the code and try and find out what was going on.

Not to mention, that will give you the chance to learn some of the soft skills, like communication, process, etc. You could even get your training done for Agile/Scrum/SixSigma/whatevs, and wind up with a great leg up on the competition.

Company wise, I'd advise avoiding larger companies, but avoiding true startups as well (and this may be where I diverge from a lot of people). I'd look for a company that is established in their field, but still small (30-50 developers, ish). I think most startups are looking for people that can give in excess of 100%, and while you're learning, it's probably not best to extend yourself that much.

Anyway, good luck with your search, you seem pretty passionate, and we can always use more people passionate about software development.

Well, I mean, is he asking for your advice? If not, I really don't see a point in bringing it up, unless maybe you have the type of friendship where you occasionally exchange quips, you might be able to hint at the idea that you're not cool with it.

I think the most I'd ever say to a friend in such a situation is: "hey, are you sure you're comfortable with what they do?", phrasing it so that you're genuinely looking out for his best interest.

awesome, thanks for the correction, I appreciate it.

Maybe a "Mechanic's Lien" could work for that[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanic%27s_lien

I've really never learned anything well by learning a book, maybe you'll have the same luck (or lack-thereof).

Id' start building stuff. Follow tutorials, and then starting looking at API docs and experimenting.

After that, I'd follow along with 'JavaScript Ninja'[1], straight from John Resig (who designed/wrote? jQuery), which gets into the prototypical inheritance, etc.

I've gotten past some fairly well-known Technical interviews through the above approach.

Either way, good luck with your journey.

http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

I imagine the "carbs" label extends to both processed/unprocessed/simple/complex carbohydrates, which I think potato belongs to "simple" and "unprocessed" (according to this[1] website).

[1] http://www.ehow.com/about_4613535_chemical-makeup-potato.htm...

a carbohydrate refers to a molecule made up of a chain of carbon atoms bonded with hydrogen atoms (if I remember correctly from Organic Chemistry).

There are plenty of different molecules, such as Sucrose, Glucose, etc, which are all forms of carbohydrate molecules.

But when people refer to "carbs", they're not referring to the chemical molecule, but most likely processed carbohydrates such as bread.

Hopefully that's more clear

For mobile-data (LTE/etc) yes, you can go into the "Cellular" section in the settings and disable/enable using cellular data for any app.

On wifi, not that I'm aware of.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean they need permissions on Android? Up until the last Android version (Marshmallow), you either gave an app all permissions or didn't install it. To deny network traffic outside of that you basically had to have root access (which is functionally equivalent to jailbreaking).

>Please name a country where selling or buying cigarettes is not legal.

There ya go[1]. It would have taken you 5 seconds to google this. The Country is Bhutan.

https://www.google.com/search?q=country+cigarettes+illegal&o...

> Strawman. By that logic we would not use safety belts or cars.

No, it's really not. Are you trying to say that we won't all die at some point?

That's also the argument a lot of people give for having dangerous hobbies, so it's not a strawman in the least.