HN user
Aaron Swartz faced 35 years in prison for leaking JSTOR articles.
Instead of fines, the Chief Security Officer should be fully responsible and face 35 years in jail if a breach happens.
You better believe they'll care about security then.
Many companies would also rethink whether they need to track and keep personal information at all.
One thing that's worrying about CoCs is that many of them seem political in nature and are used as excuses to abuse other members of the community who don't conform to certain opinions. Bryan Lunduke has chronicled a few examples of this occurring and causing destruction of otherwise healthy communities.
Imagine being able to create windows, draw, deal with io devices (keyboard, mouse, controller, etc.) and do OpenGL graphics type work with system calls.
That would allow (practically) any language to trivially create native apps with a GUI, at least trivially compared to today.
In Linux we could eliminate the multitude of complicated display servers and reduce latency in the system (making VR and AR easier to do). Windows has something similar to what I describe, but it's not very good, and has no builtin OpenGL-like system calls.
A standardized set of system calls for graphics, GUI, and IO would allow cross platform native apps to be trivially created. In principle there's no reason why MacOS, Windows, and Linux could not have such system calls added. The biggest problem is those systems have become very bloated from adhering to backwards compatibility.
I think the reason using the browser for desktop UI is because graphics and UI programming is terrible. The computer architecture and operating systems we use today are built on tech that was before graphics existed.
That's why it's trivial to build a terminal app, but god help you if you want to create a window with a button or draw a line. GLEW, GLUT, Qt, OpenGL, and the rest are just kludges to deal with the fact that we're still working with tech from the 70's. Even those kludges are so terrible that companies like Github and Microsoft have resorted to using the browser to make things like Atom and Visual Studio Code.
It can be fixed, but I'm not sure anyone has the fortitude to redesign hardware and operating systems.
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of green
I was at a conference once setting up a booth for a company I worked for. We ended up borrowing an electric screwdriver from a booth next door, but had to turn it by hand because only union members were allowed to use electric tools to setup a booth.
Unions may have helped once upon a time, but now they just take money from your compensation to pay union managers who work against a company being efficient (which makes pay even less over time).
Most people consider intellectual property as a given, and believe without questioning that IP promotes innovation. This book examines those types of arguments and makes a case that IP hinders innovation. Relevant considering the recent Oculus case.
I would love to see a return to simple designs where the majority of kB come from content vs ads, tracking, advanced 'design' that's annoying.
Wasn't krihelinator the same guy who was doing revision history on his repositories and making himself the only contributor? (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
The article is a bit misleading. The minimum wage is $11/hr. in Seattle and will reach $15 for large businesses by next year, and by 2021 for small businesses.
Amazon by itself is bringing in thousands of people per year, none at the minimum wage. To attribute a good economy in Seattle to a minimum wage is a non-sequitur.
I find it curious though how some can think raising pay by fiat will help the poor. If this were really so why would there be a schedule to phase it in slowly over 7 instead of immediately? I think part of the reason is that it is expected for natural monetary inflation to cancel out the effect of the min wage increase. If we assume 2% target inflation from the FED then that would be a 15% reduction in buying power of the dollar, reducing the burden on businesses for the increase in wage price.
With phased-in increases we tend to see effects that are within the error of margin. Naturally if there was an overnight price increase on anything there would be immediate measurable ramifications, which is probably why the phase-ins are always slow. If people truly thought the effects were positive then they would push for the changes to be as immediate as possible to leave no room for doubt about the effect of the policy.
Meanwhile the homeless situation in Seattle is getting progressively worse. With the increase in minimum wage, some people are paid more, but at the expense of some poor people not being able to acquire a job at all. Certainly we could find a better way of handling things.
Your article proves my point. He deliberately altered his data.
Piketty's data was already found to be fraudulent. He skewed it to push his own political worldview.
https://www.ft.com/content/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feab...
I think the biggest problem with accounts in general, is that the accounts never really are deleted. Any DB admin will tell you info is never deleted.
From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr:
Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again.
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Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations. Guess who lobbies to create these laws in the first place? (It's not the little guy) The biggest problem is Intellectual Property (IP). Because of it we have DRM and many companies have very literal monopolies (enforced by government) on things. Apple has a patent on rounded rectangles for heaven's sake.
What we need is a decentralization of power, and a turn towards distributed systems. The best way to do that will be to eliminate IP. That will take some time, but we should do it gradually. By allowing people to "copy" it will create competition and weaken the monopoly-like position many of these companies hold. Power will fragment and decentralize. That should be the goal.
Actually (counter-intuitively) college would be more affordable for middle class and the poor in a situation where there are no loans. Consider, there are only a tiny amount of rich people and there are many, many colleges. If there were no loans, colleges would have to make themselves affordable enough to get any enrollment. A large portion of tuition increases have come from bloated administration and useless degree programs. Those would disappear if people weren't given gobs of money in loans.
Though I can't recommend it, there would actually be better outcomes if we banned loans for college. Flooding the higher education market with cash has made it less affordable not more. Having people be responsible for the cost up front would make them better shoppers and the colleges more lean. Prices would come back down to reasonable levels.
It is precisely because of resource constraints that the open source model would work better. Take education for example. What if anyone could start a school with any standard for curriculum? It would instantly solve the arguments that happen over the democracy of curriculum we have today. It would also allow experimentation into redefining how education is done. We could easily see what works and what doesn't without having to change education for an entire state or the country. How many resources have we wasted following fads? How many good ideas have been skipped because they were too risky to implement universally?
There are obvious downsides as well, but history seems to show that the benefits outweigh the downsides for this type of model.
Imagine a building whose design and construction was governed by democracy. The architecture would be a horrible mish-mash of whatever happened to be popular, and likely architecturally unsound and unsafe. The actual construction would be a nightmare too, since someone would have the "brilliant" idea of painting drywall before laying it so people don't have to use unsafe ladders, ect.
Software can be millions of times more complicated than building blueprints. Why in the hell do you think democracy will work for software when it doesn't work for office buildings?
Contrast this with the way open source development generally proceeds. A single developer (or maybe a few) create a software project as the core team. They are the experts for that project. Other people can make suggestions and contribute, but it's up to the core team to decide if something meshes with the vision they have for the project.
What if someone disagrees? They can simply fork the project and try out their own vision. They are the expert of their own project.
This has some amazing consequences. First of all there can be multiple winners. Project A can be very popular, yet project B, which caters to a minority, can also exist and serve people with different needs and tastes. Second, it allows parallel experiments of multiple ideas, which encourages rapid innovation to take place. Finally, it helps minimize conflict between people, since you can join or start a project that meets your fancy without penalty.
Contrast this with democracy. In a democracy it's winner take all. Majority vote determines what everyone has to live with. This creates conflict and intense competition (including bribes and corruption) to get majority vote. It slows innovation because things can only be done one way at a time, whichever way was popular. There can be no single vision, everything becomes a huge contorted mess. It's hard enough to architect software with a single vision.
You should be doing research on how to make politics more like the (multi)governance of open source development, not the other way around!
Actually, the ethically and morally right thing to do would be to respect people's right to keep everything they earn. Good causes should prove they are good causes and be funded voluntarily. Forcing people to fund things causes conflict.
It's in their video just below the fold of their page.
1. the cloud - No. I'm trying to get more off my data off the cloud, not on it.
2. (censored) swearing in marketing materials - Not classy. Or to put it the way nextbit's marketing would understand, F*ck no.
Wow! What a depraved view they have. I wonder if they would still think it was moral to limit their children to a 3rd world education because it's only fair that education (level) be equal for everyone?
Human progress is made by those who are exceptional. It is only through the efforts of exceptional people that everyone else's lives are improved. Imagine if Faraday and Einstein were forced to not publish, and even destroy their papers because it wasn't "fair" that they had discovered something that other people hadn't.
Is this view of "fairness" fair at all? Should we break the legs of a natural runner, so they can only run as fast as the average person? Should we damage the brains of the gifted so they are equal with everyone else? Rather, shouldn't people have the freedom to excel as far as they can?
The intellectually gifted should be encouraged to excel as far as they can, because their work and discoveries will cause tremendous improvements to the human condition. It would be more fair for there to be special schools for the gifted, so they are not slowed down by the lowest common denominator.
Imagine that you had the intellect to cure cancer, or make solar power more economical than fossil fuels. Now imagine that you are denied from accomplishing these things because it isn't "fair" for you to earn more money than others. Guess what? It takes tons of money to do research and development. The only reason Elon Musk is making the major improvements for humanity that he is, is because he was able to use his intellect to earn lots of money so he could do even better things.
What would become of humanity if we decided to hinder everyone to the same skill and wealth levels? What would become of progress?
If only more people read Bastiat...
Does anyone have knowledge about the comparison of different FPGA boards?
I've seen the Mojo v3 from Embedded Micro, the Papilio line of dev boards, and the miniSpartan6+ from Scarab Hardware.
It looks like all these dev boards are pretty similar since they use almost identical xilinx chips. Ideally, I'd like to find a board for which there is a robust community, good support, lots of examples, and has enough capacity/performance to take on more complicated projects with increased learning/skill.
I'm leaning towards the Mojo v3 board, since it seems very easy and has shields to expand capability, but does anyone have any experience, recommendations, or "I wish I had known..." stories for FPGA development?
The author of the article is inaccurate. The Declaration of Independence made it quite clear the reasons colonists separated from Britain.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transc...
The British government was forcing colonists to house their troops, which allowed them "free" housing and food. It also acted as a mechanism to restrict free speech and to spy on the colonists. Who would speak against what the King and government was doing if you had his soldiers living in your house?
The British government was also eliminating laws the colonists had made for themselves, and instantiating his own. The government was kidnapping people, taking them overseas to be tried for false crimes. The government started domestic insurrections.
The government also regulated the colonists' trade with other countries, trying to enrich itself and pay for its irresponsible Keynesian "stimulus". Therefore the government also imposed taxes on the colonists, without giving them any representation in parliament. The government actually tried to compromise with a lower tax, but the colonists were unwilling to have no say in their government, hence the Boston Tea Party (a demonstration against taxes).
The government also created a multitude of new government offices and harassed the colonists with regulations of every sort. The government also hired mercenaries to terrorize towns, causing great damage and death. They additionally conscripted colonists into their army to fight their own towns.
All of this the colonists called tyranny, and you can read more in the Declaration.
So the colonists were not revolting because government was not spending enough. They decided to form their own government which was only funded by import duties (and in the early times, taxes on "vice" products like snuff). No income tax, no social security tax, no death tax, no gift tax, nothing.
It was this practically non-existent government (yet a respect and protection of private property) that allowed the United States to go from a 3rd world nation to the most powerful nation on earth. By 1900, the US was a scientific and manufacturing powerhouse. Permanent income taxes and a central bank would not come around till 1913.
Inflation would be a way to get rid of debt, but it literally takes money from the poor and working class and gives it to the rich.
10% inflation is equivalent to a person's salary going down by 10%. Also, any savings you had would be eaten up by 10%. Inflation is the same as taking people's money to pay debt. It's not some magic thing that makes debt go poof.
The OP is proposing a system where savings decays over time, which creates incentive to spend your money quickly while it has value, hence consumerism. This effect already occurs to an extent via the FED's target inflation rate of 2% per annum. This strategy can also cause malinvestment. A person or company is more likely to make riskier investments rather than a certain loss. These risks often lead to economic bubbles. I see what the OP is trying to accomplish, but it would likely lead to a turbulent economy.
I used to work at a place where our dev team was split in 2 and separated by 500 miles. We had centralized source control and there were days when our company network was slow. On those days I had to wait 30 minutes to check a file out and 30 minutes to check a file in. Try to meet deadlines with a workflow like that.
Never again.
I have read code that has made me cry... from pain.