saintx

People make a lot of noise about the missing function keys. But the keys that I miss the most on my 2018 Macbook Pro are the "E" and "SHIFT" keys.

"If I were misusing a word."

Just trying to help ;-)

What we call "Computer Science" is the discrete analogue of differential equations. It has absolutely nothing to do with software engineering. CS programs don't teach software engineering, which can be thought of as "how to design, build, grow, and maintain an effective software system in a team environment." Since most Universities prioritize research faculty over teaching faculty, software engineering skills are generally undeveloped in fresh college graduates, and tend to be passed along by mentors and senior engineers in software teams to junior engineers.

Shy of Universities hiring prominent open source software developers to serve as part-time teaching faculty, I don't know how we could push the transfer of these skills into the university setting and expose students to this knowledge at an earlier age.

Although it's a pleasant read, it doesn't take into account opportunity cost. Everything I do every day requires me not to do something else. There are valuable jobs that aren't urgent that never get done until I automate my way out of my current role. Russell always did treat economics as a zero sum game, when in reality it's quite expansive.

There are also jobs that need doing today and are physically possible to do, but nobody is doing them because we haven't invented them or realized they are possible yet. The Romans could have employed scientists to photograph the surface of Pluto. Physics haven't fundamentally changed since then. Only our understanding of what is possible has changed. A thousand years from now, people will marvel at all the jobs we in the early 21st century could have been doing to advance the quality of life for people around the world (and indeed all life on Earth), had we only known those things were possible.

I love the way they used color and plain English to describe that function. It would be awesome if a general app for this sort of color coded simple translation were available to help kids learn about mathematics. It'd have to be more inclusive for people with dichromacy and anamalous trichromacy, but there could be settings in the app to compensate for that.

A good roadmap for a new distributed web should be broken down by OSI model layer, showing what protocols and technologies exist that need to be replaced, what levels of the OSI model they span, and identifies single points of failure lower in the stack that must be accommodated. Too few people understand how brittle the web is by its reliance on the "magical" underpinnings of the Internet continuing to "just work".

For example, let's say we want privacy, anonymity and high availability for something fundamental like name lookups. It's not enough to simply replace DNS with namecoin (L7), if there's a critical vulnerability in openssl on linux that could force a fork in the network, possibly leading to existing blocks getting orphaned (L6), if every single session that goes through AT&T gets captured, and the corresponding netflow stored in perpetuity for later analysis and deanonymization (L5), if this application's traffic could be used for reflection amplification attacks (L4) due to host address spoofing (L3). One might try to get around those issues by direct transmission of traffic between network endpoints (asynchronous peer-to-peer ad hoc wireless networks via smartphones or home radio beacons, for example), but then you not only need to deal with MAC address spoofing and VLAN circumvention, (L2) but with radio signal interference from all the noisy radios turned up to max broadcast volume, shouting over one another, trying to be heard (L1) and accomplishing little more than forcing TCP retransmissions higher up in the stack.

And really what's the point, when you can't even trust that the physical radios in your phone or modem aren't themselves vulnerable to their fundamentally insecure baseband processor and its proprietary OS? Turns out, what you were relying on to be "just a radio" has its own CPU and operating system with their own vulnerabilities.

Solving this from the top down with a "killer app" is impossible without addressing each layer of the protocol stack. Each layer in the network ecosystem is under constant attack. Every component is itself vulnerable to weaknesses in all the layers above and below it. Vulnerabilities in the top layers can be used to saturate and overwhelm the bottom layers (like when Wordpress sites are used to commit HTTP reflection and amplification attacks), and vulnerabilities in the lower layers can be used to subvert, expose, and undermine the workings of the layers above them. The stuff in the middle (switches) are under constant threat of misuse from weaknesses both above AND below.

It might be tempting for an app developer to read this blog post and think "Oh wow, what a novel idea! Why is nobody doing this?" But in reality, legions of security and network researchers, as well as system, network, and software engineers around the world toil daily to uncover and address the core vulnerabilities that hinder these sorts of efforts.

The economic motivations that drive FOSS development haven't really been done justice in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. We used to say "Money, Glory, and Fun" were the reasons, and to some extent that was and remains true. However, I think there's always been quite a lot more to it. After the collapse of the dot-com bubble, there were a LOT of developers, particularly junior level developers, who couldn't find the kind of work they wanted and hoped to find after college, and committing to Open Source projects was a great way to get a kind of apprenticeship with some of the best development teams in the world. Participating in those efforts exposed new developers to new ideas, new ways of building software with distributed development teams, and more often than not exposure to world-class software. The monetary value of that sort of software engineering apprenticeship is hard to gauge, as you typically can't get its equivalent in a corporate internship, and many university CS programs rightly prioritize computer science over software engineering skills.

Circa 2009, while attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I was a student of Dr. Nick Hopper, whose CS research team were intensely focused on ways to deanonymize TOR traffic using an impressive variety of techniques. One that stood out was using statistical analysis of netflow to correlate browsing patterns. Considering that last-mile bandwidth providers also gather netflow and often provide flow data to three letter agencies, being able to map flows from known exit nodes to last mile service providers isn't rocket surgery. After an early initial exposure to some of their research, I never placed any trust in TOR. I still have a quote from Dr. Hopper on my laptop login screen, to serve as a reminder: "The problem with privacy on the Internet is that people believe it exists."

Freedom to assemble doesn't guarantee access to private venues. Contrary to intuition, all spaces on the Internet are private spaces.

"A Source Book in Mathematics" by David Eugene Smith. ISBN 0486646904.

Short description: The writings of Newton, Leibniz, Pascal, Riemann, Bernoulli, and others in a comprehensive selection of 125 treatises dating from the Renaissance to the late 19th century — most unavailable elsewhere. Grouped in five sections: Number; Algebra; Geometry; Probability; and Calculus, Functions, and Quaternions. Includes a biographical-historical introduction for each article.

Because there's no 'National wants a 24" Asus 1ms thin-framed LED gaming monitor, Logitech gaming controller, 5.1 surround audio, and ATS Acoustic Foam Corner Base Traps Forecasting Service'. It's logical to pick out geographic major events from current services and ship batteries, tarpaulins, baby formula and bottled water to them. But for everything else, you need fancier machine learning and lots of training data, and not everyone has that. Walmart doesn't have my wish lists. Amazon does.

Edit: Before anyone mentions it, don't buy those bass traps. They're not big enough to do the job for low frequencies. For that you need a pallet of rockwool and a weekend carpentry project ;-)

Of course they were playing word games. Could the mixture of lawyers and cryptography possibly yield anything else?