kds

Nicely implemented chat services are in demand, or so it seems. They might be sold into the billions and monetized with ads, and I guess the negative spin comes from purely business origin, though disguised as concerns of crypto professionals.

BTW, if Telegram crypto was that much insecure why members of the so-called "security community" haven't yet compromised the Telegram chat for real (regardless of any contests and petty rules) and proven they had been right?

I don't rule out this as impossible - I just think that without such proof it's all just a kind of stupid whining.

Misleading title. This has nothing to do with privacy and encryption. Just to quote a couple of recent Pavel Durov's tweets: "To media covering us this week: Telegram channels are public broadcasts. They are the opposite of private chats. Please don't mix the two."... "Our policy is simple: privacy is paramount. Public channels, however, have nothing to do with privacy. ISIS public channels will be blocked."

EU is not a state with a single national mindset and identity - it's a bag of different countries with different fragmented cultures and languages. China has its Baidu and Qzone, and Russia has its Yandex and VK. All this in spite of the obvious lack of Silicon Valley analogs.

Well, maybe the way Danny Ocean (George Cloony) manages his team in Ocean's Twelve (the movie) - tight team, clear plan, known desirable end-result, exact subtasks and timing, confidence in the experts' abilities (proven before).. A sense of common purpose, unity, and perhaps friendship helps also.

There is a book, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy"(2010), by Joseph Stiglitz - an economist of Nobel prize fame and former Chief Economist of the World Bank, who very early saw the coming of the global crisis and was laughed at in 2005-2006 for his opinion, esp. at a then held Davos summit.

In his book he elaborates deeply - but accessibly for "laymen" - what went wrong, how it could be fixed, but against whose interests in US the ideal public policy solution would have been, and so why just a dubious set of half-measures were taken, by whom, and how it might all worsen as situation in the near future.

So far, for the period from 2010 to 2012, what he claims and predicts seems right and rings true to me.

I did not see in the presentation the following code snippet:

"from twisted.internet import protocol, reactor"

Somehow I feel cheated... ;) :P

This is indeed very revealing on the interesting qualities/properties of the engine => "...and so I was watching how this game developed – Houdini sacrificed a pawn, two pawn, three pawns in a queen-less middle game, to end up winning the game in convincing fashion. During the game I wasn't sure at all that what we were seeing was a brilliant game – and not some obscure bugs I’d left in the engine… I don’t think any other engine could have played this game the way Houdini did..."

Big problems - sometimes before even to be formulated and asked - require big fundamental and applicative science research programmes and the respective advancement.

These are not something to be expected from venture capital. They are something resulting from deliberate state scientific and industrial policy, longterm goals, and adequate funding.

Examples from 1950s-1970s: DARPA/USA, and the resp. space and rocketry programmes in the former USSR.

Private capital - be it venture or not - comes later (and this is not a bad thing) when the new technologies are relatively well understood , "tameable", and can be applied to mass human consumers' or corporate needs (perceived or not, new or old) yet to be satisfied.

Private capital doesn't like fundamental scientific research risks - even in the pharmacy industry. It tries to bear mostly the market-related and implementational risks.

A thought experiment: Think on what funds and in what conditions happened the development of packet switching, TCP/IP protocols suite, HTTP, (examples of fundamental breakthrough). Then think the same about Facebook, for example.

My point summarized => States/Governments shouldn't worry about entrepreneurship programmes, clusters, tech-business climat, etc.

If adequate funding is provided for breakthrough scientific research and to the universities in general (so there are also the high-quality scientists to do it), breakthrough technology business solving big problems will happen inevitably.

The title of the submission is a bit misleading.

PG explicitly states in the essay that it's not that much on Java itself but rather on the way hackers judge technologies (the "hacker radar" in his expression).

And these are not quite predictions but statements on how Java is (or was then back in 2001) perceived.

And I think, IMHO, a substantial part of the Java success today should be attributed to the JVM, not so much to Java, the language. Clojure/Scala/etc. are kind of clues for this.

I can't wait for the next Hollywood sci-fi movie in which aliens discover Earth just to find out that humanity wiped out itself to extinction or mysteriously left the planet for some reason... but Facebook, YouTube, and Google - as computational infrastructures - still work (powered on by means of a rusty switch in some dark industrial facility room) and they start to learn about humans from their profiles.

How did he manage to find you after 20 years?

The graph is built according to Facebook data, as the article claims. Certain edges and vertices should be easy to check then.