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11 years agodiscuss

I'm not interested in individual employees but to my ear the push inside Mozilla to deprecate HTTP in Firefox sounds like it could be part of an overarching NSA agenda to make web-scale traffic analysis far easier by reducing the web's decentralized nature. Not to mention it would make the web less green since more CPU would be needed to push all those extra bytes.

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11 years agodiscuss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...

an epic science book which attempts to grapple with some of these questions.

from the Wikipedia page:

"Taylor asserts that the techniques used by cults to influence others are similar to those used by other social groups, and compares similar totalitarian aspects of cults and communist societies. These techniques include isolating the individual and controlling their access to information, challenging their belief structure and creating doubt, and repeating messages in a pressurized environment."

It's my view that ^ is generally what is at play with regard to the lower and middle classes in the United States.

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11 years agodiscuss

You were under a false impression if you're referring to a single recreational dose (approx 120mg) taken once or even twice a weekend. The studies on animals that are often pointed to in Wikipedia involve exposing lab animals to doses that are both quite high and importantly far more frequent than the way this drug would utilized during sessions or as a party drug. Controlled tests on lab animals where a more normal dose was given and a more appropriate period of time was given between the next dose do not show any compelling evidence of any kind of long-term anomalies.

The studies on humans that are often cited are typically unscientific because they're inclusive of individuals who also use other substances that are known to be neurotoxic such as alcohol or even methamphetamine. Also more importantly these recreational users are not given a supply of pure MDMA so it's safe to assume that some percentage of them are actually ingesting a cocktail of MDMA adulterated with other substances.

With all of this said, the verdict is still out on whether or not this is neurotoxic in human at normal doses.. there definitely is a long term tolerance that builds up to the effect of the drug but this alone does not prove anything about neurotoxicity.

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11 years agodiscuss

To me, just thinking philosophically about what you described, it sounds problematic even in your best case wouldn't you agree ? I mean lets say that you do somehow manage to convince your rational scientific mind that "there's something there". Now what ?

Wouldn't you then be stuck in the awkward position of engaging mysterious potentencies which impact your life but who's fundamental operations seem utterly mysterious to you ?

To me, philosophically speaking, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. The analogy that spring to mind is a tourist onboard a nuclear submarine who is jabbing his finger wildly at the controls without knowing what any of the buttons and levers do. I mean it sounds like good fun if thrill seeking is your cup of tea, and I can see how it might be possible to convince yourself there's "something there", but yet it's an inherently risky proposition is it not ?

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11 years agodiscuss

sigh This is one of the problems that comes with trying to map these traditions into our common English vernacular. We end up inventing new words (like capital Self vs lowercase self) or worse (as is often the case in buddhist circles) we borrow terminology from Freud (ego) and reuse it in ways that would have the Austrian neurologist flabbergasted.

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11 years agodiscuss

And then Buddha arrived on the scene and argued that the Hindu concept of Self (Atman) doesn't even exist. The Buddha argued that no permanent, unchanging, "Self" can be found. All conditioned phenomena are subject to change, and therefore can't be taken to be an unchanging Self.

Instead, the Buddha explains the perceived continuity of the human personality by describing it as composed of five attributes (skandhas) none of which contain a permanent entity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha

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11 years agodiscuss

I think what we need is "basic commodities" in terms of foodstuffs that a person could live off of, for example: a 40lb bag of rice, lentils, 3 different kinds of beans, corn meal, canned tomatoes, canned fruit, and a jar full of multi-vitamins. Absolutely no proof of income status should be required only a quick verification that that A. You are a human being, and B. you're not abusing the system by taking more than you could actually consume during a given time period.

This ensures that nobody ever needs to go hungry, it puts money in people's pockets because now they don't have to spend as much of their income on food, and it accomplishes this all without prying into the private details of anyone's life.

The goal in my opinion should not be to "give everyone an income" but rather to give everyone a safety net on top of which they can attempt to build a life for themselves. It trains people to be used to sharing and giving the things that we need to sustain ourselves, which is healthy and nurtures a cooperative spirit among men.

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11 years agodiscuss

* all participants retain 100% ownership of all digital assets produced during the hackathon

^ if that's included then it some kind of a scam IMHO. Why would an team want to program in a legally onerous environment as opposed to say, a mall food court ?

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11 years agodiscuss

“Entanglement is the fabric of space-time,”

Could this also be rephrased as "separation is illusion" ?

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11 years agodiscuss

certainly there will always be alternative browsers, but since they would be used by a small minority the censors would effectively have the ability to determine which publishers are "cleared" to reach out to the most broad demographics. That alone would be enough if your censorship goal was to be able to sway public sentiment.

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11 years agodiscuss

I view this as an attempt by various power brokers to subvert the power of the World Wide Web by attacking it's decentralized nature. In the beginning (like now) it'll be relatively simple for everyone to get their hands on the SSL cert they need, but the risk is that in the future, after support for HTTP has been reduced it could become more difficult to acquire the certificates required to deliver the user experience that you wish to deliver (not just in terms of price, but in terms of censorship).

In addition to making the web more centralized, forcing everyone into HTTPS actually makes it much easier to effect broad scale traffic analysis. On top of that many info-sec experts suspect that the actual cipher in play here may eventually be proven to have significant weaknesses at some future date. AND HTTPS is more expensive to support in terms of bandwidth, CPU, and increased latency. It could result it more coal being burned each year to push all of those extra bytes around.

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11 years agodiscuss

One piece of advice is to try to build something awesome that you can share with the world.

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11 years agodiscuss

> Nothing wrong with enjoying your sea salt - you'll probably get plenty of iodine from water, flour, milk, eggs, seafood, etc.

Seaweed an even more potent source of iodine, and the Japanese eat a lot of it. The concentration of iodine in these marine plants ranges from 0.5-8.0 mg/g. Terrestrial plants, in contrast, contain only trace amounts of iodine, 0.001 mg/g.

In 1964, the Nutrition Section of Japan's Bureau of Public Health found that people in Japan consumed a daily average of 4.5 g of seaweed with measured iodine content of 3.1 mg/g, or 13.8 mg of iodine. Saltwater fish and shellfish contain iodine, but one would have to eat 15-25 pounds of fish to get 13 mg of iodine.

[Nutrition Section, Bureau of Public Health. Nutrition in Japan, 1964. Tokyo, Japan: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 1965. ]

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11 years agodiscuss

Why not let the data make the technology choices for you ? The way I go about making technology choices is by examining the data that I'll be working with in conjunction the data access patterns inherent in the features that I'll need to support.

I look at things like projected read/write throughput, latency characteristics, total data volume, concurrency, and whether or not the problem domain actually requires highly relational queries.

I think that a lot of shops don't put enough thinking into figuring out what kind of data access patterns they'll need to support throughout the life-cycle of the business. This is no big deal if the product doesn't experience growth. But in terms of rich web applications which begin to experience growth the team inevitably ends up with a massive scaling problem unless their system architecture was designed to support these access patterns from the ground up.

It seems that this "growing pains" scaling nightmare has become almost a right of passage for successful tech startups. Founders are generally led to believe that it's a good thing for them to need to sell equity to outside investors in order to "scale out" a much larger team to build out the infrastructure required to perform in-flight rocket surgery on the application before it either explodes or becomes increasing cost inefficient.

While this whole process greatly benefits VCs, the high end tech engineering job market, and recruiters, it's absolutely terrible the founding team because it means they inevitably get massively diluted as a consequence of experiencing success. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but I am saying there is massive financial incentive to keep this kind of technical knowledge about best practices an open secret within the highly paid IT consultancy world.

TLDR: It's my supposition that small teams can build scalable, composable, systems by thinking about web scale data access patterns from the beginning.

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11 years agodiscuss

an example would be a data-mining project where the goal is to uncover interesting subsets of data within larger public datasets which may have business value while also attempting to answer larger statistical questions about the domain. This should require the use of multiple APIs and potentially even require the candidate to write an web crawler (always make sure the assignment is legal).

The candidate would choose a data-store for the problem domain, write a multi-threaded web crawler to ingest the data, implement some stream-processing components (parsers, filters, etc), and create a simple HTML5 chart view of the (real-time) statistics around the data.

The tools he chooses would clue us in to his/her overall knowledge of distributed systems, graph theory, data-science, networking, real-time systems theory, etc The requirement to create a small statistics visualization web app to display the data will encourage the candidate to demonstrate a requisite knowledge of web standards XHMTL/CSS/Javascript.

The overall terseness, neatness, and quality of the code is what matters rather than the "coolness" of the tools. Many candidates will lose focus on the actual data-analysis problem itself as they get bogged down in the details around building a platform to solve it. The ability to remain focused on the actual problem while writing terse production quality code is what you're looking for in the interview, and the candidate should be informed of that ahead of time.

p.s. the above problem is not meant to serve as a 'bar to reach' in terms of whether or not to hire someone, but rather it's a problem designed to measure a candidate's overall "full stackness" by forcing him/her to struggle towards solving a honest to goodness "full-stack" problem

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11 years agodiscuss

The way I think about it is.. post graduate work. In most of the natural sciences if you expect to be able to secure a decent job in the private sector after you complete school you need to do interesting post graduate work that is in alignment with the corporate sphere.

The big change we're seeing in the IT job market is that now these same sorts of expectations which are standard in more mature job markets are now often times being applied to IT knowledge workers. The new trend is that it's reasonable to expect for employees to have completed significant projects which demonstrate their knowledge and competency in a non-trivial way, which is akin to a doctrinal thesis or post graduate work.

In my opinion what this means in practical terms is that after you finish your 4 year degree, or acquire the equivalent CS knowledge on your own, it behooves you to plan for yourself a period of time, perhaps 6 months or a year to work on actually creating something which demonstrates the knowledge that you have acquired. You will own the IP for this "field work", so you can use it to qualify yourself to future employers.

What I suspect is that in the future this field work will be more important than the actual 4 year degree if it's not already. Personally I have no experience with hiring, but since it's part of my planning I think about it frequently. I suspect that already it's the case that startup hiring teams get more out of examining a well built implementation of a non-trivial concept than they do out of examining a college diploma.

TLDR: It's unreasonable to consider yourself to be a qualified anthropologist or an archeologist without having first done field work and documented in a thesis paper. This is coming to IT.

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11 years agodiscuss

the ecosystem is there, I think you're confused... the libraries work, this is the best runtime environment for a Ruby on Rails app.. which is Ruby's killer app..

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11 years agodiscuss

well you've gotta admit at least that Microsoft did in fact suck :)

For me.. cyberpunk was cool because of Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, and uhh ShadowRun.. Somehow this meshed with the rave scene and I guess also 'industrial' music which was slowly becoming cool.. but for a while.. it wasn't quite there yet and being a hacker had negative coolness connotations kind of like being into MTG or D&D.

I never thought about the release of the movie "the Matrix" as being the pivot moment after which the consensus view of hackerdom coolness shifted (at least in highschools across america), but you're probably right.

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11 years agodiscuss

I'm 33. I graduated from highschool in 2000. Back then we had something called 'LAN parties' which were off-campus adhoc gatherings of nerds who would haul their desktop PCs around and setup a temporary LAN using physical ethernet cables (ever heard of coax?). The ones I went to took place in the food court of the local mall on the first Friday of every month and were advertised in the back of a magazine called "2600 the hacker quarterly".

When I first started going to these tons of people there were BBS sysops, others were HAM radio enthusiasts who were learning about microwave packet radio, others were hardware hackers, telephony phreaks, ascii artists, and a few were pro infosec geeks.

Nobody was there because of the idea of "launching a startup" everybody was there because they wanted to learn about the Internet and the emerging technologies associated with it. When I first started going to these meetings in my teens most normal people hadn't even heard of the Internet (aside from AOL), so there definitely wasn't the idea that you're going to get rich just by hacking.

We had a blast just helping each other learn things like BSD sockets, networking, or hardware hacking for the sheer joy of it. Hacking was a FUN HOBBY but not one that would get you chicks or gobs of cash.. it was kind of like ANSI ART, demo scene, or HAM Radio which a lot of us were also interested in. There was absolutely zero pressure to achieve anything other than to have fun by learning.

There was a certain hacker ethos that existed back then which seems to be gone now as geek becomes sheek. You can still get a feel for what it used to be by reading some of the literature.

Here's a couple of books off my shelf from that time period which I highly recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Deception-Gang-Ruled-Cyberspac...

http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00605...

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11 years agodiscuss

It puts her in a stressful situation because now she has to contemplate things like going into debt while she takes the time to secure another job. Or if she doesn't have any credit then she would have to lean on her husband, or an extended family member, or worse of all end up living on the street and putting her children into foster care. She would have to calculate her odds of how likely that situation would be to transpire and whether or not it would actually expose her or her children to physical danger.

What if the woman knows that her rural grandparents or great aunt would probably look after the kids while the mom was looking for a job (perhaps living in her car part of the time) ? In that case then what you're talking about is not a threat of violence, what you're talking about is a threat of having to leave the so called middle class lifestyle and fall into a diminished or poverty-stricken lifestyle.

It's a horrible thing to have to contemplate because and the lower you fall in the socio-economic todem pole the more physical dangers you're exposed to during the course of everyday living, but that doesn't mean her situation is the same as rape

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