techman9

This article [0] covers its fascinating history and adoption by somewhat unsavory characters.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-be...

I think very few people realize that many parts of it are closed source

Which parts are closed-source?

So – this made me wonder. When we do high performance networking – why do we bother using the Linux kernel’s TCP stack at all, if it’s so expensive?

What makes the Linux kernel TCP stack expensive?

This is super useful! I've been hacking recently on qdisc classifiers, and trying to set a filter up with BPF, but there's a paucity of documentation on the subject. The tc tools are sorta documented here (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc-bpf.8.html), but it's quite hard to find docs on the underlying syscalls and the behavior of `bpf_prog_type_sched_cls`.

I bought a copy of BPF performance tools to learn more about the BPF interface, and it's really useful but quite focused on performance! I wish there was a resource of similar depth and breath about eBPF for classification/XDP.

I do wonder whether the electoral college system somewhat insulates the US from election tampering or voter fraud. The current system disaggregates election certification to the state level, which is then made official by a discrete vote of the electoral college. For instance, if Donald Trump wants to claim that the election was rigged or tampered with, it's sort of moot as it's ultimately up to the state electors.

It feels like in the face of this, it's very hard for one candidate to dispute the election, as it's ultimately resolved by electoral vote. If we were to change the system to one based only a national first past the post poll, even one certified by vote totals from individual states, I wonder how you'd ensure an impartial certification of the final result.

It looks like several of the images in this post are taken (without credit?) from Cloudflare's primer? https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-...

Build Impossible Programs - Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/18/build-impossible-programs/

Hm.. Is Functional Neurology (the journal in which this published) related in any way to the field of functional neurology? I think the latter is a rebranding of chiropractic neurology, which some would argue purports some less than scientific ideas.

- etcd

Can you explain a bit more more about why you believe Delaware is the proffered place to register a corporation?

That said, I didn’t want to mislead people. So we chose to be clear to them that there is a technical term; it’s just not going to be important for the rest of the content.

Maybe I missed something in the article, but how do you know the phone app is transmitting data to the insurance company?

My understanding was that GDPR requirements apply to all citizens of the EU regardless of where the company is located. Someone else can chime in if that's not accurate!

I'm hopeful that Zuckerberg has matured at least slightly in the intervening 14 years.

Oh my god. And Starcraft, and Axis and Allies, (original) DOTA. I was even a WOW player back in the day before I got fed up buying expansions. Man, the hours of productive time I wasted...

I don't know. I grew up in the XP era and I played a lot of brainless games (3D pinball was where it was at) and read a lot of mindless Wikipedia articles as a kid. But then I got curious about how it all worked behind the scenes.

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but my hope is some of that inquisitive spirit hasn't been totally quashed. It's too depressing think that kids are not still discovering the internet as a virtually boundless repository of human information and a fascinating set of technical problems.

I credit much of my current aptitude with (and interest in) computers to getting to use one throughout my childhood with no restrictions. I understand it can be nerve-wracking for parents ceding that much control to children, but I think children are both smarter and more self-disciplined than we give them credit for and I think digital free range can build independence in the long run. Maybe my opinion will change when I have kids of my own someday. Who knows.

What do you believe defines terrorism?

This seems very cool, but it's hard to imagine myself ever using this for anything. What use cases do you imagine this has or have other people found for something like this?

How does the JVM determine the number of cores on a Linux system by default?

Sorta. The JVM provides portability but has less fine controls for things like disk, network and CPU isolation and limiting.

The ad in question was of course totally tasteless and tone-deaf, but I'm curious as to whether Snap is uniquely susceptible to price fluctuations based on the comments of social media influencers for some reason.

On a slightly tangential note, how do you like the Homepod?

I hope I never have to do something like this to keep my beloved 2015 Macbook Pro alive.

Excuse me, the first statue should be 18 USC § 1348, not 15 USC.

No. Shkreli is going to jail because he committed fraud.

As a quick first pass at this, it looks like Shkreli was convicted of 2 counts of securities fraud (15 USC § 78j) and 1 count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud (18 USC § 1343) [0][1]. According to the US Sentencing Guidelines[2] §2B1.1, each offense of securities fraud carries, conservatively, 6 points, plus let's say 4 additional points under §2B1.1(19) for being an officer or broker, which it's my understanding he was. Let's ignore the fact that this fraud deals with potentially millions of dollars, and how that increases the number of sentencing points. Let's just say the conspiracy conviction carries the same penalty (although it seems like it could actually be higher, but not sure).

This all adds up to 30 sentencing points, which carries a recommended sentence of 97 to 121 months in federal prison under the US sentencing table [3].

A 7 year sentence (84 months) in prison doesn't seem cruel or unusual by any stretch of the imagination, and if anything seems like he got off easy. The judge didn't have it out for him, he committed a serious crime, was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and is now going to serve serious federal time for it. He broke the law and knew what he was doing. Maybe the guidelines are harsh, but that's way our laws our written. Take it up with congress.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/04/news/martin-shkreli-verdict/...

[1] https://www.scribd.com/doc/293530336/1-main

[2] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2016-guidelines-manual/2016-...

[3] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu...

That's not the way federal law works. Beneficial ends don't justify illegal means in the eyes of federal prosecutors.

That doesn't make his claims any less fraudulent.

Sentences are largely set by the guidelines published by the United States Sentencing Commission and are based on a standard table[1], which assigns "points" based on the severity of the crime and level of involvement [0]. While it's plausible his sentence was harsh for "political reasons", it's more likely that's just the way the points added up based on the facts of the conviction.

[0] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines

[1] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2016-guidelines-manual/2016-...