uasm

> "I believe, but cannot definitively prove that paper ballots cast at poll sites is the most robust against attack"

Here's how a Blockchain voting system can work:

1. Person casts vote using a voting machine.

2. Voting machine commits a change to a publicly available blockchain. The commit includes metadata such as the actual choice you made. It can optionally include even more metadata, such as "place of vote", "timestamp", "gender", "age".

3. Your vote has been cast, and the blockchain has been been modified.

4. The voting machine prints a "receipt". Your receipt includes a "commit hash". You can use the hash to see, identify and verify your record has been registered with the blockchain. So can everyone else.

5. When the voting is done - a simple python scripts traverses the blockchain - counting how many votes were given to each candidate.

This design ensures transparency and security. No compromises. You as an individual can know for a fact that your vote has been cast, and has been counted. As a society, we can finally verify and make sure our elections were fair game.

> "Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted."

What.

By voting you commit a change to the blockchain. The system should report back your "commit hash". Said hash is public (as is the entire blockchain), guaranteed to be unique, and counts towards the overall balance.

In contrast - a paper ballot can disappear. Your vote can be manipulated. All without any trace.

> The other posts make it clear without any counter argument from you that government provides a safe and stable addressable market to do business (and literally the currency).

How does a government quantify providing "a safe and stable addressable market to do business"? What was the formula used to determine the tax bracket?

Unless we have a clear formula we can reason about, the tax would be arbitrary. Is that not the case?

Moreover, shouldn't the cost of providing "a safe and stable addressable market to do business" be a constant? We know how many French citizens utilize the service, and we should also (somehow) have the overall costs of "keeping the French market afloat". If so, why does the government tax a percentage of the total revenues?

> "That's a straw man."

No, it isn't.

Road tax pays for road maintenance. Municipal tax pays for municipal maintenance. VAT and Income Tax pay for government expenditure. Taxes are collected in exchange for a service.

Foreign businesses providing entirely digital services in France aren't actually receiving any kind of service back from the French government. In other words, this specific tax is just a mechanism for collecting money arbitrarily in exchange for nothing.

That's a slippery slope.

> "The most interesting part (IMHO) of the post addressed Github, a multi-billion dollar acquisition on the backs of the open source contributors whose primary beneficiaries never seemed to give even a small portion of the profits back to the community."

There I was, thinking that hosting (through high availability, and great tooling) the repositories for free was Github's way of "giving back to the community". But apparently that's somehow not enough?

The blog looks like one giant acid trip.

That's inflation for you.

> "building web applications for over 20 years"

You built a "web application" in 1999? Would love to hear more.

> "We're not on PPP or SLIP connections anymore and yet game devs are still writing netcode as though we are."

Your average multiplayer today is significantly more complex than Quake. More data needs to pass through, at higher rates. The network is still very much a bottleneck.

> "I know this is hard to belive for some people but you don't need to be a xenophobe/nastionalist to have voted for "leave". The insults really don't help anyone."

You are absolutely right and I wasn't trying to equate the two. To be clear - I will not label leave voters as xenophobes or nationalists, and I don't dispute the legitimacy of voting "leave". My concrete point was: having a German passport is not necessarily a guarantee of all the freedoms she's seeking for herself and her children.

> "My children will now always have the right to study, work, live and love abroad. That can’t be taken away from them. I am incredibly proud I have given that to them. And now that I have the personal, individual right to do the same – a right that no politician can take away from me – I find my horizons widening too."

I share her happiness and enthusiasm, and commend her for acting on her beliefs. But this quote from the very end of the article is what many Brits believed to be the truth, up until Brexit. One important lesson here - nothing is forever. A wave of xenophobia and nationalism is sweeping the world and separatism is back in fashion. Freedom is under threat.

> "The language could make those guarantees if it wanted to"

> "Of course by C's nature there are limits"

You seem to acknowledge the fact that most of the undefined behaviors in C are essentially born out of compromise. Those compromises were driven by principles such as "keep the power in the hands of developers", "don't impose unnecessary restrictions", "keep the language clean", "avoid hidden runtime magic". The end results reflect that.

As I've mentioned in my previous comment, there's no "one size fits all", so the language makes it trivial for you to roll out your very own runtime magic (à-la Zig/Nim) which suits you best. Why is that a bad thing?

> "What has stopped people from creating a standard with no undefined behavior? Is such a thing impossible?"

I don't understand the "undefined behavior" bandwagon.

1. We have a perfectly defined list of "undefined behaviors".

2. Said list also happens to be relatively small and scoped.

3. "Undefined behaviors" exist because the language can't make certain runtime guarantees which are largely dependent on compiler/os/platform/hardware-specific promises. If you have to, just roll in your own runtime checks. C won't force those on you...

Social engineering + identity theft. "Yeah, I'm from Facebook. Mind showing me your ID? Just need to clear a few things here."

> "Has it happened because of scientific or political reasons?"

It's literally in the first sentence:

"The authors of a study that claimed to find a link between typical male brain anatomy and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have retracted it and replaced it with a dramatically changed version after finding an error in their methodology."

So - soft skills, experience, great attitude and drive. Do we really need a title for that?

Have you read tootie's comment at-all?

> "You can't say your PM is a jerk, but not the people because the people voted for him (or at least his party)."

No, it's not the people. It's some people that voted Likud in. Much like some Americans voted Trump in. Where's the strawman?

Seriously? Would you say the American people are "jerks" because Trump was voted into power? That's not how any of this works.

Everyone should also get paid more then. Also, if 33% of your job is answering support emails, should we still call it a "Software Engineer" position? How about being very clear about these expectations as-part of the job interview process?

> "kuusi palaa"

Can we get a bit more detail here? Are those variations on pronunciation? How does a native Finn able to infer the correct meaning?

That's a strange disclaimer. There should've been a cache there.

> "I mean, I'd love a beachfront property in Maui but we can't all have that"

The person you're replying to is basically saying: "having a place you can stay in, to keep you alive and going rather than homeless and broken, a safety net in essence - should be a right". Your response: "but we can't hand over free beachfront properties in Maui for everyone".

You're diverting the discussion ("but look at what communism did to Venezuela"). This isn't about free beachfront properties or luxury homes in Maui. This is about a single bedroom apartment with the most basic of utilities for people that wouldn't otherwise have the money or means to afford anything better: students, older folks, sick people, people that face hardships.

The Xi backend is already written in Rust, a relatively low-level language with a somewhat C-like FFI/ABI. The choice to use JSON in time-critical code, when more performant alternatives are available, seems to me like a mistake.

> "C is one of extreme cases"

I would say it's the other way around.

We've had the knowledge and tools to build performant, scalable and highly maintainable systems for a while now. The learning curve is there, but that's part of the trade. We've been too occupied with reducing the entry barrier though - the end result being people shoving JSON into places it should have never been in.

JSON can absolutely be a part of a text editor's architecture - with areas that don't necessarily require near real time performance (think configuration, metrics). Anything beyond that - C structs would be a great way to go, and I don't see why there's a debate here.

> "It is often the case that the object construction is more costly than the JSON parsing, and you can't fix that with binary formats."

What.

  typedef struct _some_struct_t
  {
      unsigned long some_long;
      unsigned long some_other_long;
  } some_struct_t;
  
  ...

  {
      some_struct_t foo = { 0 };

      foo.some_long = 1;
      foo.some_other_long = 2;
  }

Is somehow comparable to using JSON?

But... how else are the people that have never seen a byte array or had to flip endianness will be able to write plugins for my text editor?

> "Because when it breaks, it is broken in a stable way."

Hubris.

How can you declare something "stable" if you don't perpetually run tests to verify it is indeed "stable"?

And to state the obvious: certain bugs will lead to instability, non-deterministic, and undefined behavior - that's the very nature of things breaking down.

> "The tried and true approach to starting on your own is to land your first customer by being the cheapest"

That's definitely worth trying. But please remember, that is exactly what in an insurmountable amount of people is currently doing over at UpWork/Fiverr/Freelancer.com. You need some kind of advantage over them - if you want to nail your jobs and get paid a salary that can sustain you.

Why do they call it "stable" then?