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Yes, you're right. I failed to keep a full perspective when I wrote that. I won't defend that.

I do feel it's significant that it took about a month from the sharing on that minecraft server for these leaks to be recognized. I'm surprised no one on the server flagged it, or it wasn't picked up by some intelligence program. That's where my shock came from. It feels like a deeper problem. Maybe I'm naive in believing the military/intelligence community didn't know before this news broke.

Yup, IMHO what was leaked in this case is not so important. What is important is how it was leaked, how long it was leaked for, and how long it took to notice.

edit: OK, I was wrong here with my priorities.

Lots of people in the comments here stuck on the boring semantic definition debate of mocks vs stubs vs nulls vs whatever.

This is not really by what the article is about IMHO. It’s a great overview of how to grow and organize your application with some opinionated patterns that give some favorable properties to your system. The nullable stuff just helps achieve those properties. If you want to use a mocking library to write nullables, and call them mocks, fine. Not important.

Importantly they said within a year they will go public OR do a private market transaction to make employees liquid

Similar content for the US with a focus on trade: https://usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020/ene...

Frame your problem as a game, let AlphaZero take a shot. Now we just need the AlphaZero part.

If you let me know how you use grep to search the internet as effectively as I do with Google, sure!

Consulting firms will offer new projects every ~6mo.

There are research engineering jobs that also might be a good fit - you deal with a lot of different problems and get to satisfy your need to learn additionally from the researchers.

Registration is still required in the US for some benefits, such as awards of statutory damages. [1]

You must register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office before you are legally permitted to bring a lawsuit to enforce it. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_registration#Require... [2] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-registratio...

He sounds like someone who would give a great talk. I can see that happening for sure. I've devoted my life to a lot less before realizing there was more out there. These people put so much time into their work there's little left for a broad life - unless you make some clear boundaries like Mark is doing now. Maybe this will be a one time thing and, as you suggest, he may regret not making more time for other areas of his life. Maybe he'll manage to carve out more time for himself.

Can you point me to any historical titans of industry who regret their life's work?

A physical reality we describe with mathematical constructs - like 0.

People acting as groups exchanging capital is just as real as atoms acting as groups exchanging energy.

The author goes from

Every careful person equipped with a reliable thermometer will make the same reading of temperature. There are alternative scales, Fahrenheit and Celsius, but both record the same thing...

to

Economics is genuinely harder. National income is a more complicated concept than temperature, and there are plausible alternative sets of rules for calculating it. Serious minded statisticians have spent many years discussing these issues, and there is now a UN-sponsored standardised system of national accounts.

But it is easy to write a mathematical symbol without giving thought to what observable fact in the real world corresponds to that symbol, or whether there is such an observable fact at all.

But isn't that exactly how we settled on the truth of temperature? Years of debate about what the right constructs for defining temperature mathematically are?

Interesting to note that Jeff Bezos is an investor in Mashape: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashape

The analysis in the article shows that Aerospike is designed, intentionally or not, as a loosely accurate data store. It doesn't matter how you set it up or use it.

Oh, that looks very nice. Neat to embed Lua as a sandboxed plugin environment.

Agreed about logstash being too heavy for your app servers. It would be nice to have the functionality in a trim, native binary.

As things are, one can always direct an app sever's syslog to a logging fleet running logstash (or elasticsearch running embedded logstash): http://cookbook.logstash.net/recipes/rsyslog-agent/

You're right, I said this accusingly and that's unproductive. I think legislation like this should exist. I don't think it's right to ignore the advantage (assuming we accept they have one here) and the legislation should take it into account.

Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size.

This would give Amazon a huge competitive advantage (given their existing infrastructure). Of course they support this.

The problem is taxes are incredibly complicated. There are companies that do "tax as a service"[1].

Governments should pass tax laws in some sort of industry standard tax rules specification[2]. This way, companies and the open source world can write rules engines to process taxes and online stores can pick among the competitors, not having to worry about the complexities themselves. Costs are reduced, competition increased, and consumers win.

[1] http://www.avalara.com/

[2] this might also make taxes simpler. If legislators can't encode (compile) it, they can't legislate it!

Wish I could see what's on the monitor!

Happily =)

You're right. I think this goal is difficult if not impossible given the way things are.

Missing, I think, is the requirement that open source projects are written with something like Repobuild in mind - consciously choosing to be part of an Open Package Build Network.

It does seem to run counter to open source to standardize around a build system. However, the power unlocked by such a build system (as alluded to in the OP) might be reason to make the move. Who wants to tinker around with the 20 different build systems each of your dependencies uses?

In other words, if the open source world starts moving in the direction of a standard build system, gaining momentum, it seems to follow the open source world can reach further in its endeavors, tackling more and more complex problems.

Providing incentives seems key. I wonder why CPAN came to work so well.

Possible incentives:

  - automated testing (TravisCI does this in isolation already)

  - automated distribution (build .deb, .msi, and .pkg files)

  - usage statistics?

You're right. There is hard work in managing a system of services where any service endpoint can change at any time. It appears to me protocols for negotiating upgrades between services are important and there's no widely deployed solution for that yet.

concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists.

To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well.

[1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists (yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do the job.

To be fair, saying everything on Hacker News is in San Francisco is like walking into San Francisco and saying everything is in San Francisco.

Huh, that's interesting. Perhaps computing simply took the path of least resistance to express itself in society (for better or worse).

I wonder how computers would process text if societies with more complex alphabets had been at the foundation of the industry instead of English-speaking societies. What if Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple were all Japanese companies and grew in a global market where English were not dominant? A big if, sure. Certainly, there must be glimpses at this in history of computing.

I would pay $100 easy; more than that I might convince myself to just wait.