strlen

So here's a non-hypothetical question that I don't know the answer to: if Charles Murray was a Singaporean who tried to publish a popular book (as opposed to a purely academic paper, which was to be non-publicized and behind a paywall, etc...) that states that Malays and Indians have a lower average IQ than Chinese (and that this determined primary by hereditary genetics and unlikely to change in the long term), would he face more or less obstacles in Singapore than he did in US? My intuition says that he would be prohibited to publish in Singapore and possibly face fines and/or jail time (especially without political connections). I think this has an actual answer (have there been similar cases before? I would be surprised if there weren't), however, but alas I am too lazy to look.

In regards to paternalism (laws regulating personal safety, nutrition, private health, family relations, etc...) I also believe Singapore tends to fare worse, even if it's manifested in different ways (e.g., there may not be laws against trans fat, but there is compulsory military service, near impossibility of being allowed to live alone in an apartment, extreme difficulty of private car ownership -- which moots the discussion of car seats, etc...). As I a firearm owner, I find California (where I live) and New York gun laws to be idiotic -- but I'm pretty sure my "collection" (couple of rifles and a pistol) would mean death penalty in Singapore.

I think one place where you may have a point is the case of entitlements: it is indeed rare for democracies to have significantly cut some aspects welfare state, namely middle-class entitlement like medicare and social security (welfare programs for the truly poor do get cut frequently, but they are actually less fiscally burdensome than the middle class entitlement).

However, there have been cases of other regulations being significantly loosened, e.g., airline deregulation is something I am quite grateful for.

Here's tl;dr

Criticism of democracy as "mob rule" don't really apply to modern meaning of democracy. Absolute monarchy (or other types of absolute government) will -- in practice -- lead to far less actual liberty than we see today.

What I find quite ironic is that today in the British Common Wealth, the combination of an almost symbolic monarch, and parliamentary rule leads to -- in practice -- far less centralization of in the hands of the executive branch in comparison to presidential republics such as United States.

What's more troubling is that there's very little history of constitutional monarchies reverting to absolutism and staying that way for a long time. On the other hand, many post-Soviet USSR republics (including Russia) provide plenty of democratic presidents turning into dictators.

Seems like a reaction (no pun intended) to a false dilemma: either unlimited direct democracy (majoritarianism) and equality of outcomes or unlimited monarchy and lack of what is termed "equality of liberty" (every individual is treated equally before the law).

Whenever I hear someone who claims to like liberty preach against democracy in favour of reaction and monarchy, I feel they miss that when classical liberal enlightenment thinkers (who were the first to speak of individual liberty, advocate for free trade, property rights, and abolition of compulsory membership in guilds) critized democracy, the word democracy didn't mean what it means today: it meant direct and unlimited Athenian-style democracy, that lead to Socrates' death.

To add to this, they mistake traditionalism/conservatism of Edmund Burke (in a way, the intellectual founding father of the US republican party and modern Tories) who happened to criticize French revolution with actual continental reactionary politics (of Hegel, Metternich, De Maistre, etc...) Here's a tendency to explain Burke's support of American Revolution followed by opposition to the French revolution for a change in his views: in reality, they were consistent -- he was appalled by the Jacobins, but supported constitutional law, equality of freedom (arguing for emancipation of Catholics and against imperialism/subjugation of India), and so forth...

When reactionaries speak against democracy they do so for entirely different reasons than when US founding fathers (or the philosophers that inspired them) warned against democracy. The reasons reactionary thinkers from Plato onwards despised democracy had more to do with the fact that they saw democratic cities as having _too much_ freedom. They absolutely despised private property, trade, and the middle/upper-middle classes (all of which are likely sacred with these neo-reactionaries).

Their idea of monarchy was far more similar to Byzantine absolutism, as opposed to constitutional monarchy of e.g., Franz Josef of Austro Hungarian Empire (who, incidentally, also despised nationalism and presciently saw it as an incredibly destructive force) or even "enlightened absolutism" of Fredrick The Great.

So here's a "radical" thought: despite all of its flaws, limited (de-facto or de-jure) constitutional government (a.k.a. "rule of law" in English speaking countries, and "rechstaat" in German speaking countries), genuine social _and_ economic liberalism (aka "classical liberalism"), and democracy have (overall) greatly increased human liberty, happiness, and productivity. There's tons of rooms for debate -- but I'd imagine most honest left-liberals would much prefer to live in, e.g., US under Reagan or UK under Thatcher than in Fidel's Cuba, while most honest libertarians/conservatives would much prefer to live in social-democratic countries of Western Europe/Scandinavia than in Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, or Chile under Pinochet[1]. Conservatives may wax enthusiastically about low taxes in semi-authoritarian Singapore, but I'm not sure if that enthusiasm would continue if they realized that the country also punishes firearm possession by death.

Personally, I hope that a broader centrist liberal party emerges in the US (which would also include libertarians as part of its big tent coaliation -- Reagan and Thatcher parroted libertarian ideas, while expanding perhaps most anti-libertarian agenda, namely the War On Drugs). The NSA spying scandal was awful, but one of its results was the begging of a left-right coalition focused on civil liberties.

So in all, I think the idea that rule by a new generation of philosopher kings will somehow make us more free seems silly: it's ease to get caught up in the aesthetics of the idea, but it's bizzare to think as to how this may actually strengthen the rights to life, liberty, and property.

[1] Obviously all sane people would not want to live in Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, or North Korea -- but totalitarianism is a far more rare phenomena than "mere" authoritarianism and isn't really a danger at this point: its bloody record speaks for itself.

This was pretty similar to (at least the buildings I worked in 2012-2013) Facebook Menlo Park: open space, but many of small side offices for coding/ad-hoc meetings/views.

Personally, however, I'd prefer the reverse: offices as the default (two people per office okay, as long as there's space) with open space (with portable white boards, bean bag chairs, desks) in the middle for ad-hoc design/discussions.

Cubicles do seem the worst of both world, however: an ad-hoc meeting is no longer so ad-hoc (as it requires hunting for an available conference room), but the noise/interruption issues are no better than open areas.

> … that no employee below VP level can afford to live near.

San Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, and even parts of Cupertino and Sunnyvale are far more affordable than SF. This is especially so for couples and families.

(Suburbia is a far cry from SF in terms of culture, obviously, but that's a different topic)

Couple of things:

1) There are many lactose-free milk drinks -- from literally "lactose free milk" (milk with lactose removed) to any kind of kefir/yogurt like products.

2) Being lactose intolerant doesn't mean sudden death upon drinking products that contain lactose. In most cases, it means "generic upset stomach" symptoms (that could have any number of causes -- e.g., is it the lactose in the latte, the coffee in the latter, or is it lack of sleep?) with moderate lactose intake or very few or no symptoms when lactose intake is only occasional.

(I'm lactose intolerant, but I didn't actually know this until recently.)

Not reactive at all, well put response to mostly confused posts (including my own). I think there was mis-understanding on what was meant by scaling -- web community took it to mean something very different from what you meant. Honestly this befuddled me as well me as well, so I suspected as much -- I didn't think Sparkfun would need to go to horizontal scaling which I am quite confident you'll likely never need (unless you're doing something very wrong).

One way someone else put it, MySQL is great if you're using it as a datastore to build an API layer on top (with relational features being a huge plus as opposed to a K/V store). Postgres, on the other hand, effectively does what an RDBMS was originally meant to do -- it itself acts as that data access API.

Also SparkFun is an awesome company -- the SparkFun Arduino kits on my desk do a lot more than blink lights (though they do that too). Please continue to use run-times may be less trendy but which return responses quickly and using physical hardware too.

This is a good intro for those (like me) who are unfamiliar:

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb_compressio...

I know that a lot of work has been done on InnoDB compression, but I didn't quite grasp the extent, thinking it wasn't far different from Postgres ( http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/storage-toast.... ).

Those are perfectly fine reasons, but the stated reason had been scalability.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but the best (from the technical angle) companies I worked at -- or know friends at -- are muddle the "internal enterprise tools" and "public facing applications" divide quite a bit, but (and here's a catch) when their perceived and actual primary area of competence is building applications that at least somewhat resemble the internal tools in question.

Sparkfun is in an odd place, they could call themselves a store, but then again so could Amazon -- it's not clear that selling technology is requisite to technology being a primary area of competence.

Not to bikeshed, but what about Postgres makes the big scalability story any different than the MySQL story, unless you're talking about a commercial distributed RDBMS built on top of Postgres like EnterpriseDB?

In terms of scalability in the small, many of the MySQL 5.6 replication features skew this comparison in MySQL's direction: multi-threaded (optionally row-based) replication, global transaction ids, and the like make it easier to improve availability, add read-slaves, and host multiple databases/shards on a single machine (replication afaik is no longer per-server, it is now per-database).

There's also been work on tuning innodb for SSDs (which is a near certain recommendation for your dataset -- it gives plenty of breathing room to forestall horizontal partitioning).

I'd also look very heavily into performance with large buffer caches, compression (great way to reduce IOPS and squeeze the most out of SSD or memory space), etc... I am curious to see if any of these were compared between MySQL and Postgres. As far as I understand, innodb's compression is somewhat more advanced than Postgres, but running either on ZFS is an even better bet for this.

On the other hand, Postgres has a better query optimizer, supports more complex data and relation formats, and so on. However, most of these features aren't going to be used at scale (I am presuming you're talking about OLTP workloads).

Honestly this is a bit of an unusual decision -- I'd probably start a project with Postgres and avoid using MySQL until later, but choosing Postgres out of scalability reasons seems a bit odd. I'm curious to know why!

> I'm not actually a fan of functors; I think they obscure the flow of the code, in the same way as using inheritance in OO

While functors aren't something to us every day, aren't they more of an equivalent to the Decorator pattern in OO (which is more about composition and inheritance of interfaces as opposed to inheritance of concrete implementations which I agree is something to avoid)?

That said, I think I see what you mean -- I've found myself using functors needlessly because I've previously used adapters in their place in Java; instead, it may have been for it for me to ask myself what the real problem I'm trying to solve is.

I love OCaml as well, but haven't seen this before. It's interesting that libguestfs provides both object and module style interface and virt-builder seems to be using the object style:

http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-ocaml.3.html

Overall, great article and great code. Let's keep in mind that SML is typically taught to entry-level CS students (some of them with no programming experience) at universities like CMU, where often a term project might actually be an ML compiler in ML. It's not a terribly complex language and some limitations (which I am not going to state here) aside it has a great use to play.

It should be noted that XenServer also uses OCaml. While it's not really fair to compare Go with OCaml (the language roots are vastly different as are the philosophies -- aside from the idea that "static typing shouldn't mean typing so much you generate static electricity") both seem to do best in the "userland systems programming" niche -- that awkward place where C++ is needlessly painful, Java is ill-fitted, and python/etc... simply inappropriate.

s/const std::string* resource_hash/const std::string& resource_hash/

Perhaps the Platonic Ideal of Hungarian notation, but most code bases I've dealt with that use Hungarian notation would simply do (not a real example, but reminiscent of Win32 sockets APIs):

  bool bRateLimitViolation(uint32_t ui32Count, DWORD* dwOutPtrAddr, 
    std::string& sRefId);

In other words, this does nothing that hitting M-. in emacs+etags (or ctags equivalent for vi(m), etc...) won't do. Instead, consider this code:

  bool checkRateLimit(uint32_t attempts_per_sec, 
    const std::string* resource_hash,
    DWORD* raw_violator_ip);

Note a few changes here: there's an implicit convention -- references are only used if they're const references (otherwise pointers are used), out parameters go left, names of functions are lowerCamelCase, while local variables and parameters are snake_case (presumably cases can be UpperCamelCase), variable names are meaningful (if a variable is too long I can hit M-/ or -- again -- the vi(m) equivalent, plus the Hungarian notation advocates aren't into the whole brevity thing either).

What does work is using Hungarian notation to document exceptions rather than the rules:

e.g.,

  enum {
    kMajorVersion = 3
    ...
  };
  
  SomeThingStupid* g_YesIUsedAGlobalHere;

I do also see this argument, but I am not sure even the best type systems (e.g., Haskell) do a great job here. Yes, this:

  data HashString = HashString String
  unHashString (HashString s) = s
  hs = HashString "foo"

... is fewer lines than:

  struct HashString {
     std::string s;
     std::string as_string() const { return s; } 
  };
  auto hs = HashString {"foo"};

But fundamentally it may be easier for most to simply do:

  type HashString = String {- merely an alias, like typedef -}

  checkHash :: HashString -> Bool
  checkHash hashString = ....

This is hugely myopic: reality is far more Stanford students are going to be joining Microsoft and other established companies (we're not even talking younger public companies like Facebook!) upon graduation than startups; those starting companies are going to be fewer.

Stanford is a non-profit institution, their mission is education, not generating a profit for their share holders. Venture investments as an approach to maintaining their endowment does not, in any way, conflict with this -- all universities maintain investment portfolios.

Hennessy isn't exactly a new comer to technology: when I was looking at errata for my Computer Architecture textbook (_the_ Computer Architecture textbook) I found it more surprising for me to find that one of its authors (Hennessy) was the president of Stanford (given that Patterson is at Berkeley and that STEM folks rarely took leadership positions at universities).

I did not attend Stanford myself, but plenty of my friends have, and I've been on campus many times. Like any institution, I am sure it has many valid criticisms -- the idea the educational system is purely meritocratic and available to anyone intelligent and motivated, for example, is still a myth (in several senses of the word -- it representations genuine aspiration, but does not reflect reality).

However, it isn't some kind of a incubator for a lilly-white privileged elite that it's made out to be: it's incredibly diverse and beyond being a top-tier research university, it also has a great humanities program including a core curriculum. Indeed, the endowment is why students who do not come from wealthy backgrounds have been able to afford it (the same is also true for many other elite universities).

A long time ago, a friend who was heavily into hip-hop culture and lived in New York asked me if "people were just being shot randomly" in California, as the rap music seems to suggest. The idea that everyone in Silicon Valley is a startup founder is equally as silly: I remember the weekend after I left Yahoo (by then perceived to be in decline) to join a startup in January of 2008 (the nexus of web 2.0 boom), more people asked "why are you leaving a known company to join some tiny one that may not be around" then asked "what took you so long?"

>> Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.

I've nearly had the same experience as you but my perception of it was very different. I attended one of the top 100 high-schools in the US and one of the top non-magnet public schools in my state. My curriculum was comprehensive, but yes -- prima facie, very little of it was seemed applicable (other than intro to business -- which helped me deal with personal finances, maths -- which helped me write "demo" programs, and of course CS classes).

On the other hand, I enjoyed"knowledge for the sake of knowledge" tremendously (e.g., History courses) but most importantly -- I felt that I learned a great deal between the lines in those classes. I wrote a great deal of persuasive essays in humanities courses, I begin to see American politics beyond simple slogans, and I read books that taught me a great deal about the human condition that I may have missed out in my suburb (All Quiet On The Western Front comes to mind) and even when they didn't -- they taught me to be a better conservationist at lunch time.

I'll note, however, that high school could have done a great deal more. I came to the US in the middle of 7th grade from former USSR and stepping into a US middle-school felt like a horrible practical joke: instead of chemistry and physics, for examples, there was one class called "science", and the quadratic formula would not be covered for another year.

I suspect, however, we've a different personality -- many of my classmates echo your views on this matter, equally as many echo yours. There was a similar split in college: equally as many greatly enjoyed general education/core requirements, others saw it as a hindrance to taking my engineering courses. On a micro-level it happened within the discipline as well and to an extent I was guilty of this: I wanted to crank out of code and not do integration by parts by hand, so I went through the "motions" rather than learn this by heart, which I came to regret years later when I tried to grok the kernel trick in machine learning.

I am, however, inclined to agree with you: we should teach the fundamental concepts directly, but not at the exclusion of general knowledge. Some students are motivated by practical applications, others more so by knowledge itself -- and this may varies by discipline. Given a college-level education is effectively necessity (even if a paper saying "B.S. in CS" is not always a hard requirement, the requisite proficiency is still expected) students who are not as intrinsically motivated to learn the material use self-discipline to compensate. This is not good news, as it reinforces the popular perception of education as "boring" by necessity and attractive only to people who like being bored.

This was a very enlightening chapter in Modern Times. I truly enjoyed Johnson's work, despite his clear (if transparent) bias towards British colonialism.

In general, private armies, political assassinations, and other forms of political violence seldom lead to good outcomes: other examples would be Lebanon during and prior to the civil and (not to Godwin this) Weimar Germany with government-funded but ruthless and private and political Freikorps, as well as KPD/SPD/NSDAP/etc... paramilitary organizations. Finally, if a government enacts and enforces laws and decrees contrary to the constitution and human rights in general (i.e., it is no longer a constitutional state), introduction of political gives government forces both an excuse and the means to start acting fully extra-judicially.

I'll note that I'm saying this as a individual with classical liberal/libertarian political leanings and as a strong supporter of a right to bear arms. My view is shared with by David Friedman, an anarcho-capitalist (a view that I don't subscribe to, but respect): http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/in_case_of_revo....

I wouldn't call places south of Mountain View and Palo Alto 'Peninsula'. San Mateo is an often overlooked option (not as cheap as SOMA, afaik) but in a way it means a commute both for folks coming from Cupertino/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto/Mountain View and for folks coming from the city.

I would say significant amount of startups would still prefer Mountain View to SOMA, but they'd probably prefer SOMA to Santa Clara or San Jose.

There are many positives you've described to places further South, but there are also issues: fewer other startups, less third places in walking distances, being rather far from any kind of public transportation. In terms of employees it's somewhat of a balancing act: there are older employees with family in South Bay, more infrastructure folks (ex-Google and VMW folks, as well as various infra startups), and there are also younger employees, front-end developers, designers, and people with finance/consulting who live in SF. It would be more far more difficult for SF set to commute to, e.g., an office park in Santa Clara than for folks in South Bay to commute to SOMA (fairly easy trip by either car or Caltrain).

That said, Peninsula is exactly what its name implies, and SF is at very end (with hills in between). There will be greater pressure for startups to go further South again, as well as East (if Berkeley/Oakland adopt more startup friendly laws), elsewhere in SF (already happening), and so on.

You weren't, but other commenters did call Mountain View a suburb.

I was just calling attention to your example (25 minutes to get anywhere) as it's a better example of an average suburb than Mountain View.

Indeed -- there's some very good craft brewers or other speciality places, but in terms of bars and cocktail lounges, SF is hard to beat even compared to other cities (except perhaps Portland and NYC!)

That said Bay Area in general is hard to beat when it comes to food and drink.

By most Americans' definition of suburb, Mountain View doesn't exactly qualify. My apartment was within 15 minute bike ride of Walmart, 10 minute bike ride of downtown (including commuter rail), walking distance of YCombinator, and it on the easternmost edge of Mountain View (the grocery store I walked to was technically in Sunnyvale). My commute to work was 5 minutes.

Now I live in Saratoga where I've a 20 minute commute to Palo Alto -- and again, am in walking distance of grocery stores, coffee shops, and biking distance of downtown.

Historically this isn't true. There's a much less flashy reason for why so many startups are flocking to SF -- there isn't much space available at reasonable prices in Palo Alto or Mountain View that that's suitable for startups. If office space in Palo Alto or Mountain View was not desirable, the prices would crash.

This isn't new either: there were plenty of SF startups during the old dot-com boom as well. I'd also predict that if there is a further growth of tech startups we'll see startups spread to other areas now considered "less desirable" -- in dot-com days there were plenty of companies in Santa Clara, Milpitas, Downtown San Jose, Fremont, and even exurbs like Pleasanton. When the boom ended, CA-237 was locally called the "dot com graveyard".

The "My girlfriend and I" part -- SF is great if you're living willing to live with ~2-3 rommates, which makes things very awkward for couples who want to cohabit. It's also great if you work in the city, spend most of your time outside of your house at various "third places". In many neighbourhoods it's easy to just step out of your place and have plenty of options within your reach.

Peninsula/South Bay isn't a cultural desert -- there are amazing ethnic restaurants, used book stores, concert venues, etc... -- but they generally aren't all within walking distance, nor is it likely that a great selection of such places will be equidistant from both you and your friends. On the other hand, if (like me!) you prefer to read/code/etc... most evenings and are more deliberate in regards to outings, it isn't really a problem.

Cities also allow you to save money by foregoing having a car, but it's less true for SF: public transport in Bay Area -- even SF proper -- is quite horrid compared to NYC, Berlin, etc...

Not everyone lives in SF by choice: while SOMA is easily accessible from Peninsula by multiple modes of travel, other areas (FiDi, mid-market) are fairly far from Caltrain, expensive as far as parking goes. BART is great when it's not having a strike, but the only locations in Peninsula with BART stops are Millbrae, Dalty City, and Colma.

What most people raving about "end of suburbia" are missing is that high density (SF, NYC) living is rather expensive and this isn't likely to change (SF is a Peninsula, Manhattan is an Island).

What's also missing is that cities vs. suburbia is a false dilemma: many neighbourhoods in Portland and Seattle, parts of Peninsula (e.g., Burlingame/San Mateo area), East Bay (e.g., Berkeley), and even Downtown Mountain View/Palo Alto are far cry from the usual suburban cliches (there is abudance of independently owned restaurants and stores, relative dearth of strip malls, rail transportation, etc...) while still having lots of green areas, being amenable to driving, good school systems all available to middle class (St. Francis Wood in SF might have all of this features, but the middle class is priced out of it.)

While data is not the plural of anecdote, I've found the same things with friends who have taken MooCs or previously have followed along MIT OCW -- for some it has worked out very well, for others they fell prey to procrastination and taking easier routes.

I've also noticed similar things in community colleges: I attended a community college and then transferred to a university; this saved me a great deal of money. My community college (De Anza) has been known as a "federal school" for UC Berkeley and UCLA, yet very few of my classmates took that route. I wondered why, but came to the same conclusion: unless you're strongly motivated and self-disciplined, it's too easy to fall through the cracks in a community college (no requirement to graduate by a certain date, no financial pressure, no residential learning, no exam study sessions, etc...). To me the desire to study upper division math/physics/EE/CS is what drove me; was already used to working independently and learning from textbooks. On the other hand, those who have always studied in groups, who didn't have quite a clear educational or career goals in mind tended, or who were not used to having clearly spelled out requirements ("you complete these classes in four years with this GPA, otherwise you can't get in" vs. "these sets of universities demand these classes and usually accept students these with these GPAs") would languish, either dropping out without transferring, transferring only after 4+ (3 years was very common), or doing poorly once they've transferred.

As is think MOOCs and any other high-autonomy self-structured educational programs are of great benefit[1] to autodidacts with great motivation and self-discipline. However, nothing says they can't be combined with traditional teaching environment. As an example, consider the case of Calculus -- it's the foundation of all modern mathematics; you have to get it to study all even slightly quantitative disciplines from Computer Science to Political Science. Yet, we entrust its teaching to high-school AP (or IB for rest of the English speaking courses) teaches or graduate TAs. With MooCs we could have these classes taught by professors distinguished for their teaching ability, but conducted with the structure of a regular high-school/lower-division college environment.

... or take the case of a machine learning, a specialized and quickly evolving discipline. A small university might only have a single professor who specialized in it, but she may not have the resources to teach the class (or teach enough sections of the class). She would, however, likely have the resources to organize an experience around a MOOCs and assist the MOOC students.

Very interesting post. I often took "product sense" to be magic, I did not really understand what was it that made iPhone soar in sales when it introduced very little over a Nokia S-series I had at the time and didn't even have a keyboard. Reasoning alone did not suffice: I could explain success of OS X (a UNIX that ran on commodity-ish hardware that "just worked" -- I did not have to rebuild my kernel to get a WiFi card to function!), the iPod (ease of iTunes/ITMS/using a large hard-disk instead of a 128mb flash...), but not the iPhone.

When I (reluctantly) went to pick up an iPhone 3GS two years after the first iPhone's release, I began to "get it" -- it wasn't about a feature matrix, but the quality (including visual) of the features it did have and (most importantly) the way these features played together. Within minutes of having an iPhone I was able to use capabilities that my Nokia phone claimed to have, but that I have never found particularly useful/usable. Technically I could use cut-and-paste to share articles from the web browser on my phone via email, but I never did (but I began doing it daily on the iPhone!); technically, I could I could run apps on the Nokia but the only third party app I remember loading was Google Maps, etc...

iPhone was far from the first smart phone, but it "democratized" use of smart-phone as a smart-phone: while it was still a toy largely for the well-to-do, it was no longer a toy solely for a small fraction of well-to-do technical intelligentsia.

I could apply reasoning to retroactively conclude that "yes, iPhone is a great product"; however, it would take intuition to guess that right off the bat or much less formulate what features would be vital to a consumer smartphone. The popular image is that intuition is compartmentalized, innate, and unreachable to training, practice, or (especially!) learning. I suspect the reality is that talent does play a huge role (there's no way around it), but it is possible to deliberately cultivate at least some forms of intuition.

That said, what's even more amazing is when one develops a sense of gamechanger/show-stopper/distraction intuition about a topic that's not in their domain of expertise. There's an anecdote that when Steve Jobs visited Xerox Parc and met Alan Kay in the late 70s/early 80s he remarked that OO will be hugely important to future of programming. What I find amazing about this is:

1) Steve Jobs was not a software engineer, much less a PL wonk

2) In hind-sight the remark is obviously true

3) It wasn't a foregone conclusion in the 1980s, even among programmers. Smalltalk and CLOS were seen as crazy ideas in the 1980s, who knew that in 20 years large bulk (if not majority) of programming would be done in an IDE, in object oriented languages that run under virtual machines... Image based persistence was seen as one part of Smalltalk (and some Lisps) legacy that would never take off, but with user-accessible file system going away in iOS I am not so sure...

tl;dr Intuition about products in a specific industry can certainly be cultivated and learned (with hard work), but intuition about unknown (even if interrelated) product industries (or concepts) still feels "magical".

I trust tor to do what tor does: in fact -- as do US intelligence agencies who use it for anonymous open source intelligence.

I don't, however, trust it to do anything else: namely, I don't think of it as a security panacea. Goals of security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Anonymity is only a small part of confidentiality: tor provides a somewhat reasonable guarantee (i.e., much better than nothing or use of proxies) that I can anonymous browse censored web sites. However, alone it doesn't in any way help with secure communications to others, it doesn't ensure that the sites I am visiting aren't MITM'd, it does not protect against attacks that reduce availability of end points.

Since online content censorship is not currently a big problem in the United States -- but now a huge problem pretty much elsewhere, including in the Western World -- in most cases it isn't really an ailment for the ills inflicted by the current government overreach.

This works if physical contact is available and parties are trusted (even the weakest literal reading of fourth amendment says "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," -- exchanging a key token counts as such).

Yet what of basic online communications where key-exchange is necessary and where we have very little say about the protocols involved?

> If you were going to change one thing about the way you decrypted in the wake of today's "new information", make it be that you abandon RSA.

For the purposes of exchanging symmetric keys, what would you recommend as a replacement for RSA when configuring various services (tls-based servers, ssh, etc...) that rely on key exchange?

(Note I'm speaking with only cursory knowledge of security -- which boils down to "use RSA 4096 or the like for key-exchange, use well known open sourced and audited implementations of TLS", etc...)