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silentOpen

712 karma · joined March 19, 2009

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silentOpen··on Lessons From McDonald’s Clash With Older Koreans
Search the headline in Google and click through with a google.com referrer.
silentOpen··on Rough patch for Uber service's challenge to taxis
It's about informing Uber's de facto employees that they have liability and must carry appropriate insurance. Should the employee decline to take this responsibility or should Uber fail to appropriately inform their employees, those who have been hurt or killed are left with nothing.

To ensure that drivers are insured, Uber has responsibility.

silentOpen··on China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation
I agree with your overall point but I think your corporation analogy is slightly flawed. To my mind, the appropriate analogy with a corporation is a comparison of citizens to customers rather than employees. That is, the original commenter would like to see a number more like ARPU. Something like Average Trade Per Capita (ATPC)?
silentOpen··on Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
0.5005?
silentOpen··on I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass
In the United States, there is no expectation of privacy while in public. They are not legally obligated to do anything.

This doesn't make it any less of an asshole behavior, though. Also, it should not be the onus of each target of your gaze to constantly be saying "stop it". That's called "opt-out" and is pretty globally regarded as completely obnoxious.

silentOpen··on Programming Language Analysis
I wish I could click on the languages in the legend and have them color-coded/labeled in the chart with unselected languages washed out.
silentOpen··on Facebook 'Like' is Protected Speech, Appeals Court Says
Mechanically, yes. Linguistically, no.

Despite "Like" only subscribing you, Facebook has given that action a connotation of endorsement by naming the action "Like" which suggests agreeableness, enjoyment, or satisfaction.

silentOpen··on LuaJIT on Xen
OCaml on Xen http://www.openmirage.org/
silentOpen··on NIST "strongly" suggests dropping its own encryption standard
NSA is a customer, too.
silentOpen··on Trsst: a distributed secure blog platform for the open web
While I agree with your general point, there has been some recent work < http://www.defensivejs.com/ > on isolation of javascript from the rest of the DOM/session. What's your take on this kind of static analysis?

Also, if a given, well-known resource could be pinned to a specific hash and third-parties could easily certify that specific hash, would that ameliorate the primary concerns with JS cryptosystems?

Thanks for your time.

silentOpen··on Amazon Wants To Offer Its Smartphone for Free. Who Will Follow?
No. In the US, you continue to pay your original contract fee (including overpriced handset payment) even after the contract expires. The handset cost is not broken out. After 2 years, the telco expects you to re-up a new 2 year contract and get a new phone.

Consumer mobile telecom in the US is fundamentally broken.

silentOpen··on Facebook is bad for you: Get a life
Too bad Facebook actively punishes third-party client-side software distributions that modify its behavior or function according to user preferences.
silentOpen··on Don't Get Pwned on Public WiFi: Use Your Own VPN
Yes, a local VM with a remote VPN endpoint.
silentOpen··on The free Web program that got Bradley Manning convicted of computer fraud
If batch downloading is de facto fraud then the military should have been monitoring their HTTP logs for this suspiciously fraudulent signature and immediately stepped in to prevent the leak. That they had a mandate to secure sensitive data and failed in that task does not make Manning's actions fraudulent.

Is security important to US military or not? Both having lax security at the time of breach and then severely punishing a leaker for using trivial tools does not inspire confidence in the competence of our military security.

silentOpen··on Why functional programming? Why Haskell?
Could you elaborate on Scala's TCO support? I was under the impression that only self-tail calls are eliminated and only if the stack trace would be provably unused. Doesn't the JVM require stack traces? Can you use CPS in Scala?

I see now that Scala can encode GADTs in case classes. What mechanism is available to encode polymorphic variants? Particularly, I am interested in writing matches over unions of polymorphic variant types.

I disagree that 2 and 3 are the same (structural module subtyping, nesting, inclusion differs from applicative functors). I believe you can achieve mixins with OCaml through the object system but it's not clear to me that this addresses functor signature checking.

Another Scala bonus: 5. Objects can implicitly be null.

silentOpen··on Why functional programming? Why Haskell?
Things Scala lacks which OCaml has:

1. Tail call elimination 2. A full-featured module system 3. Functors (functions at the module level) 4. First-class modules 5. GADTs 6. Polymorphic variants 7. A decidable type system 8. ... more?

Things OCaml lacks which Scala has:

1. Traits 2. Implicits 3. Trivial Java FFI 4. Seamless syntactic macros (c.f. camlp4) 5. ... more?

silentOpen··on FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software
It's very simple: a free country is run by free software by definition. A free country has published laws that are implemented and debugged (adjudicated) in public.

If the FBI wants carriers to install software on their network devices, the FBI is implementing regulatory law as code in the network substrate. The source and its build and development process must be public. They have no magic tricks and there is no unknown capability that this could compromise. It's simply a requirement for a country governed by the law. It's how we watch the watchers.

Seeing as how we can't even get voting machine source code released, I have little faith that the spy state will cede its code in the near future. Given this, it's now time for all able-minded hackers to build tools for personal liberty and spread them far and wide. Godspeed.

silentOpen··on White House Seems Afraid NSA Defunding Law Could Actually Pass Today
Here he is < http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf >

... over here, too < https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm >

silentOpen··on FP vs. OO, from the trenches
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual005.html#to...

If you have only pure objects, you can still perform open recursion and leverage structural polymorphism (including row variables). Additionally, your objects are just values and, because they aren't mutable, can be held for backtracking.

For instance:

```ocaml class virtual biggable x = object val x = x method x : int = x method virtual embiggen : biggable end

let o = object (self) inherit biggable 0 method embiggen = {< x = x + 1 >} end

let q f o = object (self) val x = o#x method x = x method embiggen = f {< x = x * 2 >} end

let a = q (q (fun x -> object inherit biggable x#x method embiggen = {< >} end)) o#embiggen

;; # a#x;; - : int = 1 # a#embiggen#x;; - : int = 2 # a#embiggen#embiggen#x;; - : int = 4 # a#embiggen#embiggen#embiggen#x;; - : int = 4 ```

silentOpen··on SML#: a new Standard ML family programming language
The recently released ocaml-ctypes <https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-ctypes > library by Jeremy Yallop does something similar. It uses GADTs to represent the C type system in OCaml's type system with as-you-would-expect OCaml signatures. For example, you can pass an OCaml comparator to a C sort function that takes a function pointer and it works.

It's not quite as smooth, as far as I know, but it will soon include C header consumption and C stub generation to both improve binding accuracy/safety and remove dynamic paths for performance.

silentOpen··on CBS confirms reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computer breached
I believe NSA refers to themselves without the article when the organization's name is abbreviated.
silentOpen··on The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
False.

I always know when I have been shot by a police officer.

I do not always know when my data has been copied even with your assertion of Google's good will. Your conditional of "when Google is legally permitted..." is quite telling (information is fluid and ephemeral) and makes your contradiction, "False.", laughable.

The case of personal data privacy and control is categorically different than the case of physical violence.

silentOpen··on The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
You know when a police officer shoots you.

You don't know when Google exports your records.

silentOpen··on Show HN: Visualize positions of a string
Your lexer emits buffer positions which you then put into error/diagnostic messages. Afaict, this tool makes it easier to visualize cursor positions in buffers. Personally, I'm not sure about its approach but it's not an unreasonable goal.
silentOpen··on Google Glass: The Opposition Grows
As they push their own walled garden to compete with the decentralized model that nurtured them into their power.
silentOpen··on Heroku Fucking Console
No.
silentOpen··on Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks
This article talks about spectrum allocation but lacks any details about which frequencies. The closest it gets is "television guard bands". Is this the state of technical governance reporting in a modern, digital society?
silentOpen··on Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee
You mean a VM instance is a lightweight process? With hardware-assisted virtualization, multiple cores, and no preemption, shouldn't an OS-less VM be lighter than a general-purpose kernel-scheduled process?
silentOpen··on Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee
Hypervisor overhead for hardware-assisted virtualization is worse than OS-level preemptive threading? Why bother with an OS at all and just run mobile apps in a hypervisor with system service ACLs?
silentOpen··on Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee
What about hypervisor as microkernel and VM as app? Is this a viable new model for system security?
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