sarahj

Actually it is with simplified models.

Sexual differentiation in humans is split into many different pieces. There is chromosomal differentiation (at conception), hormonal differentiation (mostly through puberty), hormonal exposure in the womb (between 3-9 months), neurological differentiation (well into early adulthood in some cases).

Intersex conditions exist, and many go undetected until well into adolescence.

With all this, coming up with a consistent definition of male and female is actually pretty complicated, with lots of edge cases.

> Male/female have precise scientific terms that apply to all animal species.

Lookup how fruit flies are sexed, then compare to humans :) The animal kingdom can be a very different world.

Sure. Although it is a vary leaky abstraction :)

We used to consider depression as a psychological phenomena. That is, we used to think that we could make a person think their way out of it. Either though CBT or some other kind of psychological treatment.

Since then we have learned that neurological factors, in particular neurochemistry which are correlated with depression. We now know a person cannot think their way out of depression - we have developed treatments with varying success, although we still have a way to go.

Yes, there are several studies showing no differences in various task-based studies. There is also at least 1 MRI study I am aware of that didn't find sex-atypical differences, but did find a difference between the subjects and the cisgender controls.

However, and I repeat myself, as a whole - we now at around 30-40 studies most of which fall on the side of there being neurological differences in subjects with gender dysphoria. And in a few key areas we have replication of these findings too.

When you couple this together with long term treatment studies a picture starts to emerge - one of gender dysphoria being an intersex condition which response to hormone therapy and gender confirmation surgery. And most psychologists and endocrinologists now accept that when you take this approach, it is the most successful in producing happy and healthy patients.

Psychological. Many early theories tended along the line that gender dysphoria was an extension of sexual fetishistic behaviour. We know now this to be very wrong, but there are still many who advocate for this position.

> There are also plenty of studies showing the opposite, as well as studies showing trans people being, on average, somewhere in between the male and female averages (on the specific area of the brain observed - generally different in each study!). The fact is, we just don't know.

That should have been sex-atypical differences, which would accommodate for the "in-between" studies.

Taken as a whole, the science is pretty clear, when looking at various parts of the brain, patients with gender dysphoria (both prior and after treatment) show differences from cisgender controls, and typically, those differences align with those of their identified gender.

> And that's why GLAAD's definition is good. Trans people deserve respect and fair treatment regardless of what causes some people to be trans and others not to be trans.

These two don't follow each other. Of course transgender people deserve respect and fair treatment, like all people. I just think we have to be careful when we conflate gender variance with gender dysphoria - one is a very evolving cultural concept, the other is a major contributor to suicide in transgender individuals.

I am not a fan of GLAAD definition. I think it does more harm than good. Gender Dysphoria, the condition associated with transgender individuals, is most likely neurological in nature - that is to say, there are plenty of studies correlating sex-atypical differences in the brain with gender dysphoria. (http://transcience-project.org/brain_sex.html)

Lumping in cross-dressers and run-of-the-mill gender variance denies this very real condition the attention it deserves, it reduces it to a choice. There is nothing wrong with the choice, and people should have the right to express their gender however they choose, I just think that we need to be careful about maintaining a separation between gender dysphoria and gender variance.

On the actual question at hand, clinical intake studies have been pretty consistent in this regard. The number of people who have gender dysphoria that becomes severe enough to prompt treatment (in western European countries) is about 1:10000 (for transgender women) and 1:27000 (for transgender men). (Judge, Ciaran, Claire O'Donovan, and Donal O'Shea. "Gender dysphoria-prevalence and co-morbidities in an Irish adult population." Neuroendocrine Science 5 (2014): 87)

That being said it is difficult to estimate the number of individuals with gender dysphoria who choose not to seek treatment (or those who choose to self medicate). People like John are unfortunate, and a hopefully the bi-product of an age we are on our way out of. That being said, John is clearly not transgender, they may suffer from gender dysphoria, but they are not transgender.

Today we have a much better understanding of gender dysphoria and have a number of long term studies which show hormonal and surgical transitioning to be an effective treatment (e.g Gorin-Lazard, A., Baumstarck, K., Boyer, L., Maquigneau, A., Gebleux, S., Penochet, J.-C., Pringuey, D., Albarel, F., Morange, I., Loundou, A., Berbis, J., Auquier, P., Lançon, C. and Bonierbale, M. (2012), Is Hormonal Therapy Associated with Better Quality of Life in Transsexuals? A Cross-Sectional Study. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 9: 531–541. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2011.02564.x). I

“First you ask about what sex is on your birth certificate. Then later in the survey you ask, ‘What is your gender?’? - This, of course, doesn't work in first-world countries where gender dysphoria is treated like an intersex condition and the individuals are free to amend their birth certificates.

It really depends on what you mean by contributing and biology/astronomy software.

Many places if you want to write software that is close to the action , performing the computations and correlations that discover new things...then your best bet is some sort of technical credentials, some sort of field credential (get a degree in biology or find an internship/job somewhere) and then find a job in a university or industry lab which is working on something cool.

Then there are the citizen science type projects which take data from NASA and various other places and present it in a more useful manner so new things can be inferred - like Galazy Zoo for example.

Another option are likely to be small independent organizations that are working on smaller research schemes and need help in basic day to day stuff e.g. tools for automatically pulling citations out of pdf files and linking them together for paper discovery or simply just cataloguing and presenting know papers in an easy to digest format for public education. These may seem relatively small but every little bit helps push the boundaries, especially in some underfunded areas.

Please tell me what part of the source code infringed copyright?

The statement calls out instances of the running application infringing copyright. Nowhere does it say the source code was infringing copyright (and I am not sure how source code could unless it was either stolen or had the lyrics to "A Whole New World" in one of the comments.)

Which means the DCMA notice was targeting a tool of potential infringement not infringement itself.

I'll extend my hypothetical.

Lets say there are two groups. One group builds a generic media client - under the guise of better delivery of free educational videos (MIT lectures etc.)

The other group sets up "Movie Copyright Watch" and publishes an up-to-date list of movie torrents - under the guise of occasionally reporting this list back to MPAA and the like.

Now lets say team A decide to adopt the same configuration format as team B uses to publish the list.

Neither team has done anything wrong and the resulting application is capable of infringing copyright - and is essentially equivalent to what popcorn time has.

What is the difference? Tools are tools - it is crazy to ban knives because you can stab people with them.

There are definitely corporations where engineers who build the applications take responsibility for maintaining and running the applications - I happen to work for one.

> Attached as Exhibit A is a series of screenshots taken from within the applications of each Project that includes images of copyrighted works available through the Projects. The representative titles shown in Exhibit A consist of only some of the motion pictures and television programs that are owned or controlled by the MPAA Member Studios and that are being infringed via the Projects. Exhibit A is provided as a representative sample of the infringements being committed as a result of the operation of the Projects and to demonstrate the readily apparent nature of the massive infringement occurring via the Projects.

So by this logic...the source code for any web browser, torrent client, media player etc. etc. should be subject to these notices because they can be used to infringe copyright?

After all, through any of those applications, I can take a series of actions which could infringe copyright....

Maybe we can skirt by with the general purpose nature of the above tools...so what about tools used to facilitate penetration testing (which can also be used for computer crime) - should we get rid of that source code too?

I don't know the architecture of popcorn time, but if they published a generalized application which when given a configuration file (sources of infringing content etc.) would allow copyright infringement should we ban both? Or just the configuration file (which does not in itself infringe copyright)??

Making distinctions like this is dangerous, and allowing speech to be suppressed by corporate interests is a worrying trend.

As someone who is on a regular rotation - being oncall sucks. But there are definite advantages.

Having the team feel direct pain is a great motivator for building robust applications - if you know that that quick hack could lead to you getting paged at 3 in the morning you are far more likely to seek out additional solutions(anecdotally speaking) - it means you also have weight within the team to make the right engineering calls.

The team can bond over operations - it sucks being oncall, everyone knows that so everyone tries to make it less sucky, by clearing ops queues before handing off or making ticket messages a bit nicer.

When you start having ticket-free weeks or months it is an awesome feeling, the service works and is robust and your team can spend that time writing new stuff.

Additionally, when you have a small team building/maintaining a service it makes far more sense to rotate the oncall responsibility between them rather than an external engineer.

I would argue that the gap between a centralized authority and a blockchain is a lot less that the gulf between a blockchain and a mesh network.

Mesh networks are awesome, they have a life of their own and an be split apart and stitched back together endlessly.

Blockchains, on the other-hand, are big and bulky, require an extraordinary amount of co-ordination between the maintainers and the miners and the clients to ensure everyone is running the right software. Many are so big that more people simply defer to a company to a handle their interactions with the chain - and as these companies grow they simple forgo the blockchain altogether in many instances and simply move bits about in their own database.

Also, can anyone offer an insight into the benefits of decentralized voting and storage? I can already decentralize who I rely on for storage by trusting different parties different amounts. There seems to be no benefit for everyone to trust the same blockchain for storage - and plenty of issues (hard forks etc.)

As for voting, the existence of a vote requires the existence of a group that wishes to vote (and a co-ordinated campaign.). Many countries have decentralized counts (e.g. each region votes separately) - and may separate organizations and individuals can become monitors to ensure the integrity of the ballot box and count. What then is the advantage of moving the actual vote to the blockchain?

I'm sure many password managers, including LastPass, meet the security bar for the threat models of most people.

However,

* I don't trust any software that uploads data to a centralized service (encrypted or not)

* Especially when that software is not open source / free software.

This essentially mimics my login flow to every site I only use occasionally (e.g. twitter) and therefore can never remember the password for:

1. Go to login

2. Forget password - click reset password

3. Go to email, find reset password email

4. Login.

I wouldn't really mind if this became more common. I don't trust password managers (and access the internet from so many different devices that the only common thing they share between them is that I can access my webmail client or email on my phone.)

sigh - this question comes up so often.

No.

1. Candidates are not stupid neither are companies - trying to fill "quotas" is both wasteful and does not have a good ROI.

2. The assumption that the reason companies are not diverse is because one group of individuals is more skilled is wrong.

Diversity is not about hiring one group over another. It is about limiting and highlighting the explicit and implicit biases that exist in every organization and working to resolve them.

This can be done, for example, by making sure job ads have gender neutral language - so many do not, which turns off female candidates - which is why they are not very diverse.

A few months ago I created: http://itsy-bitsy.org/ because I was frustrated with just how many dependencies static site generators needed - I was using Hakyll at the time and it had failed to build on my new netbook - so I wrote it to take the templates and markdown I had from Hakyll and combine them.

It boils down to a 10 line Bash script and the Markdown.pl script.

It is very very basic, but I have used it to back a blog and various other content sites.

Realize that one screwed up person with a gun and opportunity could action the first scenario. Pilots licenses are more of a matter of cost than ideology, and private planes aren’t subject to many of the security measures commercial airliners are. And the only group of people in the history of the world who have used a nuclear weapon to harm innocent civilians was the united states government.

Chaotic events happen. People are terrified of them but having billions of dollars worth of surveillance state does not reduce the risk one iota.

I am fairly unorganized. At the moment I have ~20 projects in various states of completion. My main project takes up most of my time, but I try to feed the others when I can. I also look for opportunities to combine them where possible e.g. "oh I can use the framework I am developing for A to do B also"

The one thing I try not to do is burn out on one project, when I feel that happening I shift to something completely different or just go read a book for a couple of days.

urggh...is this still a thing?

AOP is an idea that sounds wonderful as a concept - "Hey wouldn't you love not to be peppering your code with logic unrelated to the business logic in your code?"

Great idea...however, every implementation I have seen is terrible. It makes code nearly impossible to test and audit and, in addition, creates a whole other set of code that needs to be tested and audited.

Taking the example at hand. From the first function I have a clear idea of what to expect, when I should see logging and what the failure cases and responses are.

Now instead of a 1 line log statement, the article proposes the 7 line meld definition is much cleaner. Where does this code live?

Another 7 lines to track the length of the call, opposed to 3 lines in the function. And now I have a hidden entry to my function - before the calling path was clear...calling dial() meant I called dial() now calling dial() means I actually call some random function which, assuming it has been written correctly, calls dial()

The error handling is possibly the one redemption here, but still - OO provides you with the tools to encapsulate retry logic just fine without resorting to AOP.

I didn't like AOP when I first came across it at University, I didn't like it when I came across some code at a previous employer, and I don't like it now.

Nice write up though.

> End-to-end Security

Not, it should be noted, End-to-end Encryption :)

It would seem, according to another comment in this thread, as if the bridges and platform have de-facto access to all traffic unless another layer of encryption is performed.

Apart from some vague notions to 256 bit and SSL there is very little written about the security and threat model of the network.

Unless I am also reading the marketing wrong, this also seems to be positioning itself as a new communication network - completely centralized to a single company/organization - with no published standards. Compared to wifi, bluetooth and to an extent the mobile network - I can't see a winning use case for this.

If scenario 2 or 3 is a regular occurrence then 1 of 2 things is true - your team is too large for the code base (so people are crawling over each other), or the underlying code is too coupled together (so people are stepping on each others toes) - either way the team is going to spend too much time merging in each others changes - compared to say writing actual code.

Reviewboard has had the ability to compare different versions of the diff for a long time. I don't see anything new or innovative being proposed in this post.

I have yet to come across a review tool which provides inline code coverage (with before and after snapshots) - this would allow me to check that a) any tests included actually exercise the new code b) the new code hasn't impacted the testability of old code. - It isn't a guarantee but it would be an easier way to do the job.

I understand the point but this comes across as immature. OpenSSL has provided years of free software, supporting thousands of sites and applications.

Of course it has its problems, and there is nothing wrong with adding more competition in this space.

But what this space needs now, more than ever, is professionalism and pride in craft (by which I mean demonstrable unit test coverage, regression testing, fuzz testing and documentation) not silly music video jabs.

Most of the energy in this space has gone into http://tack.io/ which has been called "a non-controversial first step" - I believe it is making its way though standards talks at the moment although I have not looked into it for a while.

Personally I think now is good time to revisit assumptions made a few years ago - security and privacy and in particular non-government controlled systems are on many peoples lips.

If I ever clear my current plate, I would be interested in diving into the problem.

From my years behind the hiring line...this is what probably happened:

While you did OK, you did not ace the 3-1 hour technical interviews, or they thought that you didn't make a strong enough impression in <insert important area for the job/company> - the follow up interview was probably intended to gauge those areas, and you failed to meet their standard.

Don't feel too bad about it, people flunk out of interviews all the time - even if they would be perfect for the job - most places now adopt quite a strict hiring policy because a bad hire is worse for the business than a no hire.

You could try and get feedback form the company but I wouldn't hold your breath. Simply try again with another.

I was mixing a number of different criticisms of various technologies in my post...I never meant to confer that Telehash has a blockchain.

I guess, I still don't understand the point of Telehash. Even having read through the documentation. "Establishing private communication channels" is definitely a big problem, one with a huge threat model, and the solution is probably multi-faceted - I don't see where a system like Telehash fits in v.s. something like tor or i2p for example - does anonymity fit into the threat model?

Before dragging this thread off the page I will follow up with an email. :)

There is one blockchain. The security of the blockchain requires everyone working very hard to maintain it - while it is made out of many parts it is 1 entity (like an ant colony).

Contrast with something like Convergence, where, while they share a common protocol (maybe...not necessarily) each part is responsible for itself, and not tied to any particular larger whole.

I remember reading something about that before. I just had a quick look around and, while I don't believe I have fully groked the concept it would seem to me that Telehash is solving a different, but related problem.

The web, as a technology is probably not going anywhere for a few more decades at least - people have gotten very used to opening up a web browser - very few actually understand the technology beneath.

The CA/DNS issue is one based solely around them - can I type the domain name I saw on the tv/ my friend gave me/I heard about into a web browser (and these days) and it can direct me (securely) to the page where I can do business.

Telehash seems to fit in on another level. Perhaps one which we are heading towards - a world of machines securely finding and communicating with each other to achieve a goal set for them by some human actor.

This space is becoming more crowded and no good contender has emerged - and I think there is a good reason - they are either too radical as so they can't find a footing, or they are too conservative.

The documentation is slightly lax, but I feel telehash is the latter - it doesn't seem to be solving any problems already solved:

* Space/Storage/Data Transfer - I don't care what anyone says, the blockchain model is simply no scalable, any system where are full client has to hold onto/download gigabytes of information is a non-starter for me.

But still, in any new system - hopefully decentralised, we need to distribute information. Any kind of system we build must be tolerant of partitioning - I think the solution to this is injecting some trust (ala Convergence)

* Speed - Computers work in nanoseconds, the web currently operates in seconds (some sites in milliseconds) - we can't beat the speed of light, but we can certainly start removing the cruft from our communications - HTML, XML, JSON, CSV - are all formats designed for people. We need tools that let us manipulate formats designed for machines.

Our networking protocols are like this as well - as much as people hate ASN.1 it solved some problems decades ago allowing the phone system to scale on just duct tape and wd40

* Power - Blockchain bashing time again - we live in a world of limited, expensive power. We are getting much better at producing low power devices, people like wireless devices. Why should our networks be so power-hungry?

Just a few, rambling thoughts.

Why have a single entity at all? Moxie Marlinspike proposed Convergence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA) as a solution - I think that something like that has far more potential wheels to travel than a Namecoin based system.

I should be able to choose who I trust, a notary system would allow me to do just that. No central CA systems.

The biggest concern I can see is Identity management, but, as mentioned by Moxie, most of these CA don't do anything close to proper Identity management any more - I have a number of certificates bought from quite a few different CA's all made out to my rabbit, at no fixed address.

Notaries can, of course, do additional verification - they could even advertise this as a premium.

I don't see why this can't be extended to DNS lookup's either. I trust X notaries and pin the results I get, I can choose to trust a majority, or be hyper paranoid and require everyone to agree. No need to run a power hungry blockchain, no single point of technology failure.

Technically, all of that is feasible today. And I imagine we will see a number of different technologies combined to form a proper, decentralised, system.