Apple posts WWDC2011 session videos - <AUTHOR> http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/

<comment><USER2> I consider these to be the real value of my $99 developer fee. The talks from last year were outstanding.

<comment><USER3> Registering a developer account is free.

<comment><USER2> I know I just assume that this is one of the things supported by that fee. These conferences can't be cheap to put together.

<comment><USER4> They aren't cheap to attend either

<comment><USER5> And they sell out fast since they keep them so small.

<comment><USER6> So small?!

<comment><USER5> Well, they sold out ~5000 tickets in 12 hours. True, that's not small, but clearly there's more demand than they are providing for and a lot of developers got left out. It's the same size as Google I/O for comparison.

Splitting off OS X from iOS would probably help a bit but Apple won't do it.

<comment><USER7> The last couple of years, Steve has said that he's sorry he can't find a bigger venue. Perhaps that's the problem? Which venue could the conference use to support more attendees?

<comment><USER8> And then there's the problem of keeping the ratio of apple engineers constant to not lower the value of the conference (which is part simple knowledge and part direct access to Apple engineers) for attendees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "You need to use Safari to view this video." Grr.

<comment><USER10> Since you also need a Mac to develop for iOS, they probably assume you have it. Can you download Safari for Windows to watch?

<comment><USER6> Sure, you can download Safari for Windows. The page mentions that you need OS X, though. I don't know what's up with that and whether that's actually true. As far as I know installing Safari on Windows also installs QuickTime, so all the necessary components (see below) seem to be there. (If all else fails you are still be able to download the videos inside iTunes on Windows and OS X.)

That browser limitation just doesn't seem necessary, though. Apple is using the standard video tag, that should work in many modern browsers – but they are using a .mov container for whatever reason. Apple is realistically not going to use Ogg Theora or WebM but they at least could not put their h.264 videos inside QuickTime containers.

Even if they insist on using a .mov container it is possible to view those files in, for example, Chrome. Apple, in fact, does just that on their public facing pages (a current example: <http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats- new/#video-lion>). Same markup, same type of file, and it all works in Chrome (and maybe even other browsers).

It just makes no sense.

<comment><USER11> Except Apple is a hardware-company who wants you to buy a Mac and will use every occasion they can find to try to push you towards that goal.

They once almost had me, but when I found that the MBP with "similar" specs to my Dell (half-size SSD, Core2 instead of Core i5, no full-HD display unless I got the BIG clunky models, no built-in 3G what so ever, etc etc) cost almost 100% more, I decided "fuck no".

I've had an iPhone, but I'm still not infected with the Mac-disease. Thank god. It seems to get expensive quickly.

And with that kind of markup (almost 100% for inferior stuff !?!?) it makes very much sense that they want you to buy their hardware.

Edit: I know you guys love your Macs. I don't care. My point is that Apple has insane margins on their sales which noone else has. In that regard, them trying to push sales as much as possible shouldn't be a considered a "troll- comment", like the voting so far seems to indicate. Jeez.

<comment><USER12> Why no specific model number? AFAIK, Dell's Adamo with "similar" specs to MBA ended up being more expensive than Macbook Air.

<comment><USER11> Really. Mentioning model number wouldn't really be much use, but here is what I have now: A Dell Studio XPS Laptop with 256GB SSD, 4GB ram, 2.4GHz Core i5 dual-core CPU, 15.6" 1920x1080 LED display, built-in bluetooth, 802.11n wifi and the _very important_ 3G module.

The MBP offer I got for a 70% higher price was: 128GB SSD, 4GB ram, 2.4GHz Core2 Duo CPU, a sub-HD LCD display. For full HD I had to go almost up to an almost 20" "laptop". Wth. And it still wouldn't be a LED-screen. Built-in 3G module is not an option and I would be forced to carry around a stupid dongle for internet access. Screw that.

Anyway: The MBP has 1. better casing, 2. an inferior last-gen CPU, 3. an inferior capacity drive, 4. no built-in 3G option, 5. an inferior low- contrast, low-DPI screen. And it costs 70% more. I'm not paying that much for better casing and ability to run OSX in a supported state. No way.

* The current MBP lineup now may be different but that was what I was offered when I went out shopping and ended up with this laptop. The price difference is very, very clear. The MBP is only an option for those already bitten by Mac-addiction.

Just to be upfront about the prices offered: The Dell-option just below 14000 NOK (Google it). The Apple-option: slightly above 23000 NOK. Not even a real question at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They also have the slides up in PDF format, if you don't want to watch the videos, or just want to skim.

(Caveat: Some of the slides are very screwed up though either due to the iPad or the Keynote conversion process. Overlapping unreadable text and such.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone recommend any particularly awesome ones?

</comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone been able to find the sample code to go with these?

<comment><USER15> You'll find sample code in the iOS and Mac Developer Libraries. The prerelease libraries can be found at:

[http://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigation...](http://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigation/)

[http://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/navigation...](http://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/navigation/)

(Drop the "/prerelease" to get the publicly available, non-NDAd libraries.)

<comment><USER14> Thanks, but I was actually thinking of the package of sample code specifically for the demos in the videos, rather than the general sample code collection. For last year's videos you could actually download an image containing the code for all of the demos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's great and a big improvement over what used to happen (you had to either attend WWDC or pay astronomical amounts of money) but I still don't get why Apple insists on putting any kind of barrier between developers and information on how to develop on Apple's platform.

Microsoft makes the talks from their conferences, like PDC, freely available few days after the conference.

Google goes even further by live streaming some of the talks (as in this year's Google I/O conference).

Apple can't seem to break free from their "top secret, control freak" approach even when it doesn't seem to make any sense.

<comment><USER17> What do you mean? All of the WWDC videos are available for free today, less than two weeks after the end of the conference.

<comment><USER16> They are not freely available as in: first you have to register with Apple as a developer and you can only view them after you log in with your developer account.

I'm not even sure if they are free. There used to be a way to become register developer for free, at the lowest tier, but didn't Apple change the rules in the last year or so and you have to pay $99/year for mac developer program and $99/year for iOS developer program, so to access all the videos you actually have to pay $200/year?

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's terrible that Apple wants you to register for free to download the videos about developing for their platforms from their site; they owe it to you to provide the videos without a login, which is indeed free.

All of the videos are available without paying Apple anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RIM Takes $485M Hit Over Unsold PlayBook Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397150,00.asp

<comment><USER2> Amateur hour really _is_ over:

[http://blogs- images.forbes.com/marcwebertobias/files/2011/05...](http://blogs- images.forbes.com/marcwebertobias/files/2011/05/playbook_4_400.jpg)

Amateurs could not possibly lose a half a billion dollars competing head-on with a juggernaut and ignoring the obvious time and time again.

UPDATE: Enough snark. Here's my post-moretm: They drank their own kool-aid. Every single thing about it strikes me as the work of a team trying to sell to their management rather than to the market. Or, the work of a team that was only allowed to build what their management wanted to succeed rather than what the market would reward with success.

Their advertising brags and boast of how awesome it is, but nobody who actually talks to customers would believe that this is true or believable. Management, on the other hand, might believe it is awesome if they were reading the ad copy while looking at some incomprehensible PowerPoint with fancy graphics.

Their choice of technologies and features hits the sweet spot of what the company is prepared to fund rather than what customers are prepared to buy.

The whole thing seems inward-facing, a little like certain start-ups that are buzzword compliant because that's what VCs want to fund rather than because that's what markets want to buy.

<comment><USER3> 100% spot on (from the outside, at least).

I think they were banking on their "huge market share" in mobile phones (that has since began sinking down) to get buy in. "Oh I have a Blackberry I should buy this thing." That's a good market to shoot for if there's a compelling reason for the customer to do that, but I didn't see a single feature that would really push someone to buy a Playbook over an iPad even as an existing RIM customer.

<comment><USER4> > but I didn't see a single feature that would really push someone to buy a > Playbook over an iPad even as an existing RIM customer.

It's even worse than that. The useless thing couldn't do _email_. You know, the one thing that made RIM a success in the first place? Yeah.

<comment><USER5> Could this have something to do w RIM management not wanting to canabalize it's already dwindling BB phone market? I've never used one but the ppl I know still clinging their BBs cite it's email capabilities as why they're sticking around.

Tablets and phones don't seem to directly compete, but then again they're both mobile devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Despite its troubles, the PlayBook is not going anywhere, RIM said."

If that's a direct quote, it's an unfortunate choice of words.

<comment><USER7> Their CEO always says shit like this. It bottles my mind how much the CEO believes in his products. IMO he's too optimistic and quite frankly needs a hard smack of reality. That or he's just trying to keep investors at bay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> RIM's primary distribution channel is now proving to be more a barrier than once thought. The sell-through approach using the Carriers as primary is horrible. Carriers will promote and sell what is profitable and buzzing. In recent weeks RIM has alllowed employees to purchase Playbook internally at a discounted price (discount becomes taxable income). I know employees who have purchased upwards of 20 devices for friends and families. It makes me wonder, what if they were to open this up for all their devices? What if they'd done this 3 years ago? Sure it would eat into their profit margins but it would definitely increase market share and create stickiness (aka Crackberry).

</comment><comment><USER9> I own a Playbook and it's really, really a nice device. It's fast, browsing is convenient, it can multi tasks, the form factor is better than the iPad and it can be used as a mass storage on my PC. I've played with the iPad, the iPad2 and the Samsung Galaxy but I prefer the PlayBook.

The big problem: no apps.

<comment><USER10> I've got a Playbook, and I completely disagree with you.

The lack of apps is a symptom, not a problem. The development environment is very poor, the app store itself is slow and badly designed, and it's missing important glue like Android's killer universal share screen.

They didn't want to cannibalize their phones, and missed the fact that their phones are going away - and that phones, computers, tablets are turning into a spectrum of connected devices that are expected to do more or less the same things but in different form factors appropriate to different contexts.

The hardware itself is pretty awesome, so that's not at fault. And there are neat UI touches like the active borders. But overall, it's just a terrible operating system, and they didn't have a clue what it takes to create a developer ecosystem. Even the apps they do have feel like cheap knock-offs. Have you played Angry Apes?!

It's no wonder that RIM's now talking about pushing its enterprise lock-down functionality - its only real selling point at this stage - to iPhones and Android devices.

<comment><USER11> RIM will never win, because they're developer hostile.

The developer environment sucks, the APIs have always sucked, the signing system has always sucked.

Keep in mind that until very recently, the BlackBerry OS had no way for you to execute a HTTP request without implementing your own logic about which of the 500 different esoteric connectivity options you wanted to use. It's just a clusterf*ck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't it the Playbook that still can't check email, contacts, or a calendar without being tethered to a Blackberry? I could have told you day one that was going fail, doubly so if they were expecting their main customers to be enterprises. "Hold on, let me plug my phone into my tablet to check my schedule...wait, why do I have this tablet again?"

Hopefully they dump their CEO(s) and get someone who understands the current and rapidly changing mobile and tablet markets. If not, RIMs days are numbered.

</comment><comment><USER13> Given the people who bought Blackberries, it would seem like an ARM-based netbook with a really awesome keyboard and 3G would have been a better idea for a first step outside the cellphone market. It really seems like the Storm and Playbook were me-toos instead of looking at what makes RIM great and pushing that.

<comment><USER14> > Given the people who bought Blackberries

Depends on the country, Blackberries are mostly (to solely) corporate in the US, but in Europe it tends to be used a lot by teenagers and young adults for extensive messaging thanks to BBM + good keyboard.

On the other hand, I don't see how they'd get _that_ demographic a BB tablet, so you probably have a good point.

<comment><USER15> Their new market is heavy texters. Corporate US has all but given up on the platform, with an avalanche of switching to Android and iOS.

If you want a cheap phone with an inexpensive text-messaging plan, RIM is your go-to device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "...we believe the PlayBook, which will be further enhanced with the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 software, is a compelling tablet for consumers that also offers unique security and manageability features for the enterprise."

The device is named a "PlayBook" yet they're targeting the enterprise market. That seems wrong. Did they start by targeting general consumers then shift their target market without changing the device's name?

At least RIM is sticking to their guns and forging ahead with the device, unlike the wishy-washy maybe-we-will-maybe-we-won't emanating from HP regarding webOS.

<comment><USER17> A playbook is a book of strategies used by sports coaches. Typically in US football.

<comment><USER18> This is nice - if you know the meaning behind the term. But RIM is an international company, so not all of their costumers know this all to well.

I as a non-native speaker was definitely not aware of the term, so my first association was "play" - I am sure there are many more like me. This is definitely an unfortunate choice of a brand name.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, just providing some context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They have nobody to blame but themselves. They shipped the tablet too early and without fully finishing it. Why should I need to own a BlackBerry in order to utilize something as simple as email or BBM? Sure, it's a tablet that's meant to be integrated with your smartphone but I should be able to buy it as a standalone product as well. The only thing that can save them now is to abandon the PlayBook and do a completely _new_ tablet that can actually gain tablet market share.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's called skating to where the puck was.

<comment><USER21> Ironic, considering they're a Canadian company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Given RIM's atrocious performance and the fact they've been hemmorhaging customers for a long while, where's the shareholder revolt? The board might not see the obvious, but surely the investors in RIM can see that when a company loses some 80% of it's value, something needs to change.

</comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone who owns an IPhone or Android smart phone decide to buy a Playbook? I still can't believe RIM insists on stick to their own OS rather than building their features onto android, joining that ecosystem, and putting out quality hardware.

<comment><USER24> Spoken like someone who doesnt use one. The OS of the Playbook has as much in common as android does to Windows. As a tablet OS it is actually very good. Putting Android on it would be a downgrade imo.

<comment><USER23> >Spoken like someone who doesnt use one.

Obviously I don't use one. No one uses one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A coworker had a playbook. He said he "was _not_ disappointed". The selling feature was that the OS looked like OSX, as opposed to "the usual crappy android UI".

He didn't really have an answer for why he didn't just get an iPad if he wants something like OSX on it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd buy one for US$ 50, tops. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> Lower the price by 40% and all the problems will be resolved.

<comment><USER28> I'm pretty sure that only solves one of the problems, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ya lower prices. Make it like 99 dollars or something and it will sell like hotcakes. Or hell even cheaper.

<comment><USER30> It "worked" for HP's TouchPad. They lost $500 on every device, but at least they finally sold those tablets.

So how about giving those PlayBooks away with a box of Cracker Jack's? There must be some kids who want a tablet that can't send email and doesn't have any games.</comment></comment>


Proof of concept systemd-journald privilege escalation exploit - <AUTHOR> http://exploit.delivery/systemd_journald_exploit_no_aslr.py <comment><AUTHOR> Put together by one of the guys in the labs group at my company. Here's the accompanying blog post [0].

[0] [https://capsule8.com/blog/exploiting-systemd-journald- part-1...](https://capsule8.com/blog/exploiting-systemd-journald-part-1/)</comment>


Preoperative Patient Frailty and Operative Stress and Postoperative Mortality - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2755273 <comment><USER2> Isn't this pretty much accounted for by doctors at this point?

Isn't it well know that there's a good chance that an elderly patient will die during or soon after significant surgery? For instance, there's a good chance that soon former President Jimmy Carter will once again have a fall that will result in him being hospitalized, and shortly after surgery, he'll pass.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is the paper that was written about in this NYTimes article. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/health/frail-elderly- surg...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/health/frail-elderly-surgery.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> "The findings suggest that even minor surgical procedures are associated with high risk for patients with frailty and that surgeons and referring physicians should consider whether the potential benefits of surgery warrant the increased risk."

TLDR: sick people die more when you cut them open, even for little cuts.</comment>


Evidence points to OOP being bullshit (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://content.pivotal.io/blog/all-evidence-points-to-oop-being-bullshit <comment><USER2> If you're only being buzzword compliant with Object Oriented Programming, yes, you're going to have a meh experience. If you're only going so far as to be buzzword compliant with, say, buying a guitar, it's much the same. On the other hand, if you also spend some time with diligent practice and study, which the purchase of the guitar would have enabled, you may well have an extraordinary experience.

Object Oriented Programming got to the level of "McDojo" martial arts practice. A minority of people learned the essence. The majority got to hang out with people spouting the same ideology, went through the same motions, and felt good about socializing while circle jerking together. So on the whole, it's accurate to say that OOP was oversold, in much the same way that martial arts was oversold. There was some calisthenic benefit, but not much more than that.

So what makes Functional Programming any different? I'm not so sure if anything can't turn out to be just a structured way of writing spaghetti code. Most writing is meh, and deserves to be eventually forgotten. Most music is meh, and deserves to be eventually forgotten.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shite.

<comment><USER3> > So what makes Functional Programming any different?

It prevents bad programmers to fall into messy OOP.

Languages are less about readability and features, but always about what it allows the programmer to do, so that it prevents him for writing bad code.

I came with the idea that a programming language is a frame that surrounds the programmer, and only allows him to do things in a certain way that is tolerable and not abusive in term of design.

I'm not a fan of rust, but all the ckecks rust is doing, are very rigid, yet it is exactly what I am talking about: you help the programmer to avoid doing things he might regret and not know about.

<comment><USER2> _Languages are less about readability and features, but always about what it allows the programmer to do, so that it prevents him for writing bad code._

You can write bad engineering student FORTRAN code in any language. I've seen it done in Smalltalk. In all fairness, most functional languages make this painful enough, that all but the dimmest don't bother.

 _I came with the idea that a programming language is a frame that surrounds the programmer, and only allows him to do things in a certain way that is tolerable and not abusive in term of design._

That's bankrupt. The best you can really do is to encourage and reward the programmer for doing it the right way. If you earnestly try to block every way of doing something bad, you just wind up with a system that's unusable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Steve Yegge made this argument in a more dramatic fashion in 2006, with his now notorious "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns": [http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't Pivotal responsible for the Spring (Java) framework? In that case it would make sense to trash-talk OOP for them, since Spring is widely known to take magic Java annotations to an absurd level. While OOP for things such as oauth and data binding etc. would result in slightly more verbose upfront code using just libs and light annotations, the majority of time spent in Spring/Spring Boot apps is trying to understand Spring's opinionated framework and boilerplate on Java newbie boards. Sadly, Spring has overtaken alternatives for Java developers who know what they're doing and generally exercise more mental discipline in their work.

<comment><USER6> That _would_ be funny. If you think OOP is "bad" (I don't think it is..), let me introduce you to my friend _AOP_.

Taking one of the most absurd features (COME FROM [1][2]) from a programming language satire (Intercal [3]) and making that your composition mechanism is...special. And then complaining about Java OOP while quoting Alan Kay, as other posters mentioned.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect- oriented_programming#Cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect- oriented_programming#Criticism)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language)

<comment><USER7> If a programmer is using a "cross-cutting" concern to do "control flow" then the issue with the programmer.

[http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/papers/kiczales- ECOOP1997-AOP.p...](http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/papers/kiczales- ECOOP1997-AOP.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is old (2013). However, i think it's really ironic to talk trash about OOP while thinking in Java and pointing Alan Kay in the same post. Alan Kay being the father of OOP always made clear Java wasn't the OOPL he had in mind.

<comment><USER9> It's a bit confused alright. His first two quotes are from people who designed OO languages. (Joe Armstrong later realised that Erlang may be the only fully object oriented language, one he learned that java is not oop [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5205976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5205976) )

<comment><USER8> Nice link!. I should add that exist a correlation between objects and lambda calculus for functional programming. So, they are different perspectives of the same idea. And you have to take care of both perspectives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Presenting opinions as facts is dogmatism and that is exactly what this article is.

Many programmers moved from imperative programming to structured programming to object oriented programming (a form of structured programming), and some of them perceived benefits while others didn't. This is some paradigms work better with different requirements.

Any paradigm can be used to implement unmaintainable spaghetti. Don't blame the paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER11> All evidence points to this article being bullshit.

I'd like to see someone try to make a decent game (including frontend) with Erlang, Haskell or Scala.

Sometimes you need to separate state into different objects and let those objects manage their own internal state otherwise the code becomes overly complex. OOP was invented specifically to support this kind of isolation. Yes, sometimes OOP makes it more difficult to follow the flow of logic but once you understand the structure and core components of the system, it's much easier to make non-breaking changes and additions to the code.

This article is just regurgitating FP rhetoric and preaching FP as a silver bullet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Examples where OOP has worked really well: iOS and macOS. The Objective-C and Cocoa combo must be a large part of the success of these platforms.

Where it has not worked so well: Web-backend programming. To me OOP has always felt out of place there.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty low-quality article, mostly just a bunch of links to other opinions. I'm used to better commentary from pivotal.

I don't really understand why functional programmers bash on OOP so much. If you code up a bunch of immutable objects with methods that return changed versions, you're now a _functional object-oriented programmer_. It's a pretty nice paradigm! It beats the hell out of "everything is a list" and car/cdr is your hammer.

Yeah, a lot of Java programmers fail to grok immutability and irritate us with wordy half-measures like builder patterns. On the other hand, the stream api allows you to write code that looks reasonably close to the clojure-equivalent -- perhaps a bit more verbose, but at least it's typesafe. If you want more concise there's Varvr. This is more of a culture problem than a language problem.

<comment><USER14> My avoidance of OOP predates my use of FP like most people I know.. As imperative C programmers of old, we often had to deal with people trying to add C++ on top and then needing help.. Their projects were often months of work and a total failure because they had fractally encoded their model into how their code, data and model operate. Inevitably a few of their ideas of that model were wrong or needed to change for unexpected reasons and are encoded across all sorts of things via inheritance and method parameters.

Essentially they have invested in huge blocks of take it or leave it nonsense similar to the banana quote in the article.

I get the same general feeling from FP OO as normal classical OO. There seems to be a need for a hierarchy in parts of base type systems and other standard library pieces, but once some framework layer declares a class to be extended you just have bug after bug that all relate to an imaginary hierarchies invented because everyone needed to provide a nail for the OO hammer.

Personally, I'm much happier with interfaces that rely on a duck style to implicitly define types with implementors. I find it sad that some older languages are reimplementing classes when it seems like newer ones have correctly moved on to no unique relationship hierarchies in general code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What evidence? The article presents none.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's why I love C++. If you avoid using OOP, it quickly becomes a good enough language to use.

I just wish it was just faster to compile _sigh_.

<comment><USER16> I'd be happy if it could just find all function defs in a translation unit without forward declaring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Backtracks on the title's claim in the opening sentence. Then states some basic well-known points that even advocates of OOP would agree with, even in 2013. Then neglects to suggest solutions except alluding to functional programming a couple times.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rewrite my 35k LOC in a language that makes writing the thing I am writing easier, and you will have a convert.

Reprimand me for doing the thing I am doing without providing tools or guidance on how to change, you have a new enemy.

</comment><comment><USER18> most people are like sheeps .

they tend to follow whatever is bright and shiny without truly understanding why they even need it.

</comment><comment><USER19> (2013)

</comment><comment><USER20> For any given paradigm, has useful software been written using that paradigm? If so, it is not "bullshit". And it's not exactly surprising that well-known academics and theoretical computer scientists smack talk Java - it's not appropriate for most number-heavy problems. For the other 99% of programmers, it does CRUD pretty well.</comment>


Escape the echo chamber - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult <comment><USER2> _Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he'd believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he'd missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction_

This makes it sound like Black undertook this "reboot" on his own, just by reading and listening. That's not how Black himself tells the story:

 _In 2010, I moved across the state and started college at this little liberal arts college in Florida, which was about three and a half hours from home_

Okay, this was one step he did take on his own: he changed his environment. But eventually he started talking to his fellow students.

 _And I would say, "This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here's the journal that's put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races." And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I'd say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I'll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore._

The whole thing (it's a podcast transcript) is worth reading: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily- transc...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transcript- derek-black.html)

<comment><USER3> > And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies > and explain to me how statistics works

Has anyone actually put this data together in a presentable way? I've only seen things that say the opposite and it would be good to actually have a read of something well-formed that sets the modern progressive case for dealing with this research, beyond simply ignoring it altogether.

<comment><USER4> Tell them that it is completely impossible to set up rigorous controls in a study of ethnicity and intelligence anyway.

The bigger question is why do some people care so much and why are they so focused on ethnicity among many other data points that could be predictive of intelligence. I typically ask these people if some connection between race and intelligence actually existed, is it your intention to change how society is organized or governed somehow? If it is, then there are historical examples of that going badly, and if not, then why is the answer important?

<comment><USER5> If IQ is closely related to genetics and IQ is important for your society (two bold assumptions) you could argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction.

But as you say it could go really bad really fast. Especially if some of those high IQ genes are linked to some illness.

For your question about why some people are focused on ethnicity? As usual: people's appearance are easier to discriminate upon so it makes it easy to make different people an out-group. But it's not just some supremacists doing it: the hardcore NA "diversity is good" groups focus on skin color. I'd argue they seem to be worse because it feels like for them all blacks are the same (African American) while the recent history of Africa should tell them how wrong it is.

<comment><USER6> >argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction

See .. I find this line of thinking heinous. Why do you not instantly trip up when you type this?

<comment><USER7> You should have a reason for that. Just feeling terrible might mean you're inside an echo chamber.

Most people support eugenics in the form of outlawing incest because it can lead to faulty offspring. We also think treating neurodegenerative diseases is a good thing. Most parents also hope their kids will be smart. Or at least they don't hope for the opposite. Women don't like to have kids past 40 partly because of higher risk of Down's syndrome. And there's a test for that which can help them decide to abort the baby. All these things are us trying to make future humans smarter, mostly by eugenic techniques.

Maybe you're thinking of actually killing people? That's not quite the same as selective breeding.

<comment><USER6> Those are all perfectly appealing reasons to step one iota closer to the reality described, which is that we should promote the DNA-privileged forward on the sexual reproduction stack.

Which is something, I think, a little different to all the nice, shiny new things we're getting from CRISPR, et al., sure. Its the dangerous, vile things I care about: opening the door for selective breeding and clones, racial purism, etc.

The technology is one thing; the ethics another tube entirely. Somethings things go boom, othertimes _BOOM_.

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with racial purism? We do it with dog breeding. What are the ethical problems?

<comment><USER8> Purebred dogs suffer a host of genetic diseases resulting in considerable suffering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To try and escape both pitfalls I attempt to follow Altucher's advice to have less opinions.

[https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have- op...](https://jamesaltucher.com/2012/12/ten-reasons-i-dont-have-opinions/)

<comment><USER10> Which is a nice thought, but he's outsourcing his opinions to someone else and betting on them to make the right call. Most people who did that in Syria are now dead or fleeing.

If you're wealthy this is no problem of course. The wealthier you are, the less opinions you should share or fight for. You can afford this because you can always put your fortune (and yourself) into an available free society with property rights.

If you're poor however, it only works as long as reason and democracty triumphs in your society. Because nobody will want you if you ever have to flee.

<comment><USER11> Rich-shaming for that post was already weird, but pulling the Syrian war is downright bizarre.

Are you saying the Syrians caused the war, and did that by not having enough opinions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe the best article I've read on the topic. Too often people use terms like filter bubble or echo chamber and mean different things. Generally, the lack of access to contrarian viewpoints. But that's rarely the actual problem. If the author is correct, it's the lack of trust.

This is especially great: "Here's a basic check: does a community's belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don't subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it's probably an echo chamber."

</comment><comment><USER13> I work in the arena of echo chambers [1] and wrote a piece on the different usage of the terms "filter bubble" and "echo chamber" [2]. Interesting that the author chose "echo chamber", even though "filter bubble" tends to be used more often in academic settings.

1: [http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com](http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com)

2: [https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference- betwee...](https://medium.com/@nicklum/the-surprising-difference-between- filter-bubble-and-echo-chamber-b909ef2542cc)

</comment><comment><USER14> > A social network composed entirely of incredibly smart, obsessive opera fans > would deliver all the information I could want about the opera scene, but it > would fail to clue me in to the fact that, say, my country had been infested > by a rising tide of neo-Nazis.

Except it would. I know no-one that talks about opera (or anything) all of the time, and it's hard to think that a rising tide of neo-Nazis would escape the notice of a group of reasonably educated, establishment liberals.

Much of filter bubble theory as it applies to social media seems to treat humans as unthinking demographic blobs defined entirely by their status and political beliefs, and the bubble as something impenetrable, through which new information about the world cannot pass.

Sure, within groups there is groupthink, and I get the appeal of techno- dystopianism, but I can't accept the idea that this is in any way a new phenomenon, or that we are not more connected to new ideas now than we have ever been.

<comment><USER15> > _it 's hard to think that a rising tide of neo-Nazis would escape the notice > of a group of reasonably educated, establishment liberals_

It's more likely that a bubble of "reasonably educated, establishment liberals" would not understand the grievances of another group of people, and perceive them through the lens of "a rising tide of neo-Nazis", othering them and directly creating conflict, rather than understanding them.

This is how the filter bubble actually works. It's not that the information doesn't come through; it's that it comes through a glass darkly, at high risk of alienation from people holding out-group views.

If, for example, you think that people who don't like change in the social composition of their community are morally wrong for feeling uncomfortable, you're going to push for cultural movements that demonize them. And that makes the problem worse; it amplifies conflict and widens the cracks in society.

There are multiple self-coherent but mutually incoherent views on how society should be structured. As I get older, I find myself feeling less strongly about one view versus another. I am most suspicious of those who believe they have found the one true view; their zeal for change isn't tempered by doubt. No matter which coherent perspective you have, you won't succeed in moving people with other perspectives if you don't acknowledge that their perspectives are also coherent. Your best bet for achieving change is reframing that change within the perspective of those you're trying to convince. Saying that the people you're trying to convince are evil because their view is wrong won't end well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I believe that there are even cases of echo chambers for systems software out there. For example, the database community is pretty tight with a center of gravity around Stonebraker (Postgres, Vertica for columnar stores, voltdb for NewSQL dbs). Well, there's a DB out there for OLTP workloads called NDB (MySQL Cluster) and not only is it the fastest in the world (200m transactions/sec on commodity hardware), but it is also GPL-v2 licensed. But, it's completely unknown in the valley. And when evidence is presented about it it, the evidence is ignored and conflated "in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined"

Reference: [http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per- sec...](http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.se/2015/03/200m-reads-per-second-in- mysql-cluster.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> > _Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we > encounter the evidence._

That proves it is in fact bad logic; the victims of the echo chamber are _not_ rational to the point of behaving in a logically sound way.

In actual logic, the order among a set of prepositions makes no difference and they can be evaluated in parallel also to the extent that they are independent; there are no side-effects.

If two propositions A and B contradict each other, that one of them you heard first isn't necessarily the true one.

If everyone is working in good faith (mistakes are acknowledged and fixed) then rather chronologically _later_ propositions should be more trustworthy. People who are not willing to replace old propositions with new ones that contradict them are making themselves impervious to the good-faith improvement in understanding.

</comment><comment><USER18> >we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media.

I disagree with the premise already. Anyone got data? How many people actually get their news from FB?

And no hn, reddit and other content aggregators are not just as bad. Following topics != following people.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not sure why, but that font Academica Book Pro vibrates on my screen and is difficult to read. Maybe it's too thin? It is a serif font and looks optimized for print. Firefox and Chrome on Mac.

</comment><comment><USER20>
      Maybe political allegiance has replaced
      basic reasoning skills.

Not for one second, do I buy into that idea. Not for one second, do I imagine, that because of one election result, that suddenly people have somehow been transformed into anything vastly different throughout the world.

We have phases, where aggregate priciples of interaction change, not unlike shifts in musical taste. Cycles of class and intellectualism, and cycles of low-brow simplicity. Each pole has its own facets and degrees of appeal and attraction. The cycles are an expression of the prevailing winds for the dominant age group.

For the most part, a lot of people clearly thought their vote didn't matter, didn't really care who got elected, developed an opinion that the presidency doesn't matter, and cast the vote that seemed to be biggest joke.

Two other, much smaller, groups of people exist: those that genuinely believe a tiny, weak, incompetant and ineffectual government is a good thing (because substitute teachers aren't as demanding), and those that genuinely want to help, improve the world, and make a difference in benefitting the lives of as many people as possible, starting with those that have the least going for them.

The goof offs, though, voted the most and won. That's it. That's the only thing that happened, and it's not a disaster yet. Let's see if we can keep it that way, and stay on track.

There's some violence and sabotage in the picture too, and all of it stems from an unnecessary war in Iraq that should have never happened. Some of the very real political destabilization on the fringes is essentially blowback and revenge for that debacle. Take a step back, and note the coincidence in timing for each. I'm not sure this stuff will difuse itself. It may simmer on in the background for some time, and might not have any solution, as retaliation tends to fuel a continuity of grudges.

</comment><comment><USER21> Your page has loads of problems! Like: Who are you? Why would I trust you? What's your business model? What's your privacy policy? Code of Ethics? Security? How does it work?

I would not install the app, nor fill in your website forms before anything like that is clear!

Maybe you should interact with The Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com), because the subject matter is really interesting, and the problem and ways to avoid it need more attention.

<comment><USER21> I am getting downvoted, but this is honest feedback. Points for improvement.

<comment><USER11> Are you sure you've posted on the right thread? You've probably been downvoted because those questions are either easily answerable or simply don't make sense (what app?).

<comment><USER21> Wow, thanks for pointing that out. This is my mistake! I was commenting on gnicholas above, and this link:

[http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/](http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com/)

My bad, everyone :(</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Crippling DDoS vulnerability put the entire Bitcoin market at risk - sahin-boydas https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/09/20/bitcoin-core-vulnerability-blockchain-ddos/ <comment><AUTHOR> I spend a lot of time looking for bugs in cryptocurrency code. In spite of this finding, I'd say that Bitcoin Core is among the safest cryptocurrency applications. The average random C/C++ open source project suffers from far more potential issues, for example [1].

Related, here's an unfixed btcd (Go Bitcoin client) DoS [2].

[1] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss- fuzz/issues/list?q=imagemagi...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss- fuzz/issues/list?q=imagemagick)

[2] [https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1287](https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1287)

<comment><USER2> You may be right about the relative security of Bitcoin (given that it's the oldest and one of the most audited codebases while also missing some of the more complex and potentially problematic features of other cryptocurrencies it seems like a reasonable assumption) however I'm not sure if it makes a lot of sense to compare it with other "random" open source projects.

The problem with Bitcoin is that any vulnerability can usually be exploited very easily for huge gains. You have a DDoS? Short BTC, run it, make millions. Remote code execution in the client? Steal funds, make millions. Easy and untraceable if you're careful. That's the whole drawback of the immutable ledger approach, if you get screwed the only solution is to convince everybody else to do a hardfork. If you're a bitcoin billionaire with relations in the big bitcoin shops you could get it to work, if you're a rando with a dozen bitcoins stolen from your account you're on your own.

Even something as bad as heartbleed seems almost benign in comparison since it's significantly harder to exploit, especially at a large scale.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 Bitcoin Core has, from day one, been a remarkably safe code base generally speaking. The protocol is free (or used to be) of any string manipulation or other behavior that often leads to code execution. Many major issue causing features were added after the departure of Satoshi, and are generally considered to be mistakes for other reasons (BIP70 introduced a dependency on OpenSSL for the GUI wallet, which is being deprecated and is now a compile time option). For the most part any issues in the original code are to do with consensus level understanding of how the system operated, which is to be expected given that the entire construction was novel at the time of its creation. People often repeat a mantra that the Satoshi code was bad, when it was surprisingly problem free given the enormous amount it accomplishes.

I personally pondered if this particular issue would have any market effects and concluded that it would not substantially. This is based on fact that there's altcoins in existence with > 800 day consensus level failures disclosed privately, or publicly known, which still have reasonably active trading. Some altcoins manage to exist with almost no operational network at all, just a pool, a node or two run by the creator, and an exchange with substantial internal volume and not a lot else.

For altcoins in particular it's difficult to actually know if this is representative of what would happen in Bitcoin, some of the issues I'm aware of in altcoins simply haven't been exploited because there's not enough profit in it at the moment, even though the design decisions in these altcoins (eg, facets of proof of stake) are then used to justify the safety of other systems.

<comment> village-idiot Personally I believe that those altcoins trading despite serious consensus issues is a sign that we're in an asset bubble of some sorts.

In a healthy market, assets that do not deliver on their most basic premise should trade down to zero eventually.

<comment><USER3> This is an interesting premise when applied to the stock market.

In theory, the value of a stock is the discounted value of all future cash flows, on the premise that all profits (in excess of debt servicing etc.) belong to the shareholders, and they have a legal claim on that cash.

In practice, have you ever known a company who, at the top of their product cycle, says "Welp, we got no idea what we could possibly spend all this money on that has a positive ROI in excess of what you could get elsewhere in the market, so here's your dividend, we'll keep raking in the cash for you as long people want to buy our products, and then we'll liquidate and return the cash to our equity holders"? Usually the death throes of a company involve them hiring a series of excessively overpriced turnaround CEOs, firing them with multi-million-$ severance packages, acquiring promising startups for lots of equity which they end up killing, and paying a large and disengaged workforce to search for other jobs.

They do eventually trade down to zero eventually, which proves your point, but the conclusion one could draw is that every individual stock is actually an asset bubble. They rarely, if ever, end up returning the company's profits to shareholders, but shareholders who exit when it looks like there will be a lot of profits in the future can make a lot of money at the expense of the shareholders they sell to.

<comment> village-idiot One could make the argument that a dying company is just a very slow and inefficient exit scam, and that the shadiest of ICOs have just made the process much more efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the commit that fixes the issue (CVE-2018-17144), the root cause was failure to call checkTransaction with the third (last) argument set to true:

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14249/files](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14249/files)

checkTransaction is defined in verify.cpp:

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/consensus...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/consensus/tx_verify.cpp#L159)

The last argument, fCheckDuplicateInputs, causes inputs to be checked for duplicates. A comment inside this method notes:

 _/ / Check for duplicate inputs - note that this check is slow so we skip it in CheckBlock_

To summarize, the fix appears to replace the faster call to checkTransaction in CheckBlock with the slower version that checks for duplicate inputs in each transaction of a new block. What's not clear to me yet is how failure to check for duplicate inputs in a block's transactions leads to DoS.

Many consider Bitcoin Core to define the Bitcoin protocol. If this is true, then the new release can be considered a soft fork update.

Previously, blocks containing transactions with duplicate inputs would have been considered valid. Now, such a block will be rejected by patched nodes.

This case is an excellent example of how difficult it is to determine what exactly the Bitcoin protocol actually requires.

We only gradually "discover" the protocol by exhaustively following every branch of the Bitcoin Core code base.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 > Previously, blocks containing transactions with duplicate inputs would have > been considered valid. Now, such a block will be rejected by patched nodes.

No, they would have crashed the node, they would not have been accepted as valid. This is not a soft fork.

<comment><USER4> From the Wiki:

 _A softfork is a change to the bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks /transactions are made invalid. ..._

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Softfork](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Softfork)

It's not clear to me yet under what conditions a node would crash. With a single duplicate input? With dozens of duplicate inputs? Duplicate inputs spending segwit outputs?

If some duplicate inputs would have been permitted without crashing nodes then the update appears to fit the definition of soft fork.

edit: also, it appears the DoS vuln doesn't apply to pre-0.14 nodes. Either those nodes would have rejected dup-input blocks (making 0.14 a hard fork?) or the update just released could be seen as a soft fork.

<comment><USER5> I've read that there was some sort of assert check, which would fail, and cause the whole node to crash.

Therefore fixing the crash is not a "soft fork* because nothing was accepted in the first place.

Yes, if it actually accepted the duplicate input, that would cause unlimited inflation, which is obviously a huge deal.

Or in other words. We got extremely lucky.

<comment><USER6> There appears to be a workaround to bypass the assert check in Bitcoin Core 0.16 that allows one to mint new coins by using an input multiple times and it be accepted by the network without crashing. Probably will be waiting until the dust settles on this before publishing that test case though, since it's clearly much more severe than a DoS

<comment><USER5> O.o wow, that is way worse than I expected.

Do you have a source for where this was written up, or did you come up with this on your own?

I just want to be able to reference back to this in the future. So whenever you decide to publish, I'd love to check it out!

<comment><USER6> Actually it only seems to be a side effect of our test environment. Using a more realistic environment makes it not effective, sorry for the false alarm

<comment><USER5> Hey thanks for the update!

But I'd encourage you to do a bit more investigation.

According to Bitcoin core, there _is_ an inflation vulnerability.

[https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/)

So maybe you weren't too far off from independently discovering the vulnerability yourself.

Edit: apparently you were credited in discovering the vulnerability yourself in the very discloser that I linked.

Congrats!

<comment><USER6> The credit is currently wrong, it should belong to one of the developers on my team, David Jaenson.

My comment was an early disclosure before I fully understood how sensitive the details were. Even without going into detail or providing any code it was very irresponsible of me to off hand just mention that possibility. It didn't click how sensitive things were until a bitcoin core dev confirmed it. Sorry anyone who sees this. I merely reported the exploit, David Jaenson is our genius security researcher that definitely should deserve all credit.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 Yeah. I'd rather you hadn't done that personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title is kind of clickbaitish... Taken into consideration that a miner has to sacrifice ~$80000 (12.5 BTC) I don't see this happening.

<comment><USER8> It also isn't entirely true the entire network is/was at risk. Not all nodes connect to all other nodes. So a malicious actor would have to waste the money and only bring down the nodes directly connected. Most nodes today aren't accepting new connections. Also it only affects full nodes not SPV. I think the best attack vector would be to crash competing nodes but remember they have to spend a block reward to do so and all they get in reward is a block reward. The miners have enlightened self interest to not do so. I think the risk has been blown out of proportion but they are being smart and showing an abundance of caution to make sure this does allow for use case they aren't considering or some other cascading failure.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 You can walk the network and crash all nodes with listening sockets, this ruins pretty much everything. There's some non-public infrastructure that would perhaps make mining continue, but non-listening nodes can't exist without sockets, and neither can SPV nodes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Had this been exploited, it wouldn't have caused _that_ much damage.

Some exchanges would probably have gone offline for a few hours.

Nobody would have lost any money or bitcoins.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 > Nobody would have lost any money or bitcoins.

That's not entirely true. The current crop of Lightning Network nodes rely on their host being up for the safety of their channels. If their node is not contactable for more than 24 hours they risk having their money stolen.

Large changes in the network graph has been shown in Bitcoin to take quite a while to sort out, due to the way the rumoring network attempts to find stable and reliable peers. This is still a substantial problem now, as there's only a few thousand listening peers that can accept incoming connections out of over 10,000 total. If only those nodes were remaining online there would be substantially reduced capacity to relay blocks and transactions for a period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is wrong and plain ol' fearmongering. A coordinated denial of service on network nodes is theoretical at best, as it would require a series of further, orchestrated actions on the rest of the blocks to achieve it.

This flaw alone isn't likely enable such an attack. Furthermore, most nodes will upgrade very quickly, greatly reducing the attack surface.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 > This article is wrong and plain ol' fearmongering. A coordinated denial of > service on network nodes is theoretical at best, as it would require a > series of further, orchestrated actions on the rest of the blocks to achieve > it.

This requires no action other than pushing a specific binary to an unpatched node in order for it to crash.

The cost of producing the binary is one time, approximately $80k USD depending on luck.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't the cost be significantly higher than $80k since the miner would have to keep his machines on for quite some time at a loss in order to mine a full block?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _The bug relates to its consensus code. It meant that some miners had the > option to send transaction data twice, causing the Bitcoin network to crash > when attempting to validate them.

As such invalid blocks need to be mined anyway, only those willing to disregard block reward of 12.5BTC ($80,000) could actually do any real damage._

Do the blocks need to be mined twice? Or do you just have to submit a garbage block for the second one?

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 > Do the blocks need to be mined twice? Or do you just have to submit a > garbage block for the second one?

No. One transaction included twice in a single block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >This could have been waaaaay worse

The cost of the attack would far exceed ~80k USD in bitcoin block rewards because it requires a substantial amount of hashing power to have a realistic chance of successfully producing a block that reaches consensus and is added to the canonical chain.

<comment> CVE-2018-17144 > The cost of the attack would far exceed ~80k USD in bitcoin block rewards > because it requires a substantial amount of hashing power to have a > realistic chance of successfully producing a block that reaches consensus > and is added to the canonical chain.

No, the cost is simply $80k on average to find a block, or around $5k for BCash. If the cost to produce a block exceeded its value substantially, it would be on a whole unprofitable for Bitcoin miners to continue existing at this point in time (network difficulty, bitcoin price).

<comment><USER14> > BCash

It's Bitcoin Cash.

[https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call- bit...](https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash- bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > As such invalid blocks need to be mined anyway, only those willing to > disregard block reward of 12.5BTC ($80,000) could actually do any real > damage.

> While this certainly seems unlikely (barring any digital Tyler Durden-types > wanting to destroy something beautiful), it does raise eyebrows. The great > defence of Bitcoin is that it's far too decentralized to be brought down by > any single entity.

Generic turmoil of the platform could panic selling. $80K to cause mass disruption could pay off considerably for someone shorting either bitcoin or an altcoin.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are these bitcoin exchanges just a gigantic implimentation of a pyramid scheme. I mean where is the added value coming from? Are they similar to "over unity" machines in physics?

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't the proof-of-work algorithm itself a DDoS? PoW requires all nodes in the network to see a consistent state of a transaction for it to be correct. By definition this violates the CAP theorem.

<comment><USER18> Small addendum to the shortcomings of the CAP conjecture: [https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition- tolerance/](https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How long until a 0day wipes out the entire market?

<comment><USER20> What would it take to do that? Something entirely unpatchable, I expect. I'm having trouble imagining what kind of exploit would be that powerful.

<comment><USER6> This has happened with other, much smaller, cryptocurrencies. The choice usually agreed upon by exchanges, developers, and community is to pick a known good block before the attack and fork the chain backwards from that point. It requires significant downtime and is of course very complicated, but several different cryptocurrencies have used this method and recovered to a functioning blockchain

<comment><USER21> > several different cryptocurrencies have used this method and recovered to a > functioning blockchain

The most notable is Ethereum, with the DAO hack and the subsequent bailout. Did lead to Ethereum Classic, which is a fork that gained some traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We're witnessing the maturation of crypto as these kinds of resolutions only make it stronger. It's going to be used as a flight-to-quality asset class after the traditional markets crack in a few months.

<comment><USER23> Why do you think traditional markets should crack in a few months?

<comment><USER22> 1\. They always do. 2. We've been in the longest bull market in history 3. Black Swans exists 4. The 'message of the markets' in this case, the yield curve along with a few other related reliable predictors: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3MM](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3MM)

<comment><USER24> Why does Bitcoin help here?

The traditional markets attempt to assign a value to the expected future value of all (public) companies. As technology advances, goods and services can be produced and delivered more efficiently, allowing $1 to buy more. Investing in the stock market is using your money to drive the improvements, and selling your stock is reaping those rewards.

Bitcoin is just a list of financial transactions that a couple of different computers agreed on the order of.

I don't see how they are comparable.

<comment><USER25> Because people hoard stuff with a "limited amount" (i.e. gold and silver) when they are afraid of hyper-inflation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Americans don't need more degrees, they need training - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/22/help-wanted-americans-dont-need-more-degrees-they-need-training/ <comment><USER2> This is from the operator of a coding school. They have an interesting payment plan. "There is no upfront cost to join Holberton school. We only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years once you find a job." That's more interesting than anything in the article. The school takes the financial risk on students not getting a job. This is the reverse of most for-profit education, which relies on loans and doesn't guarantee a job.

I wonder how this is working out for Holberton School.

<comment><USER3> [I am the cofounder of Holberton] it is working great for us. As you said we do take the financial risk on students not getting jobs. Education is so broken today: students get in debt and don't find jobs because too many universities are in the business of signing in students and not finding them a job :( hopefully we can show the way and we'll make this change. Purdue university is now offering this too, which is a good sign that things are changing. Honestly I think that this is going to become the norm simply because the current system is broken an unsustainable (US students debt is in Trillion USD! and cost of atudies is getting higher and higher -> more devt and more ppl who can't afford Education anymore) 10 years from now ppl will simply look back and laugh at today's system.

There are two other important things that this model solves too: 0. There is no more financial barrier to high quality Education. Anyone can afford Holberton* 1. Colleges need to make sure that you are a fit to their system/culture/field. Today this is not the case so students are wasting time and money in programs they are likely to fail. By having this tuition model they will need to be transparent and make sure everyone succeed

(*) we are in SF so cost of living is high. this is a pb for a lot of candidates. We are activally working on a solution.

<comment><USER4> > too many universities are in the business of signing in students and not > finding them a job

If you are a university in the "business of finding students a job" you are university'ing wrong.

<comment><USER5> _> If you are a university in the "business of finding students a job" you are university'ing wrong._

Then everyone is university'ing wrong!

Universities spend an _enormous_ amount of time and money getting students jobs. Maintaining relationships with recruiters, developing alumni networks, and entire departments of full time staff dedicated to "career services".

There's a solid critique of education programs that are overly sensitive to industry fads [1], but IMO universities and educators should definitely include "finding students a job" as an explicit curricular goal -- balanced, of course, with "ensuring students have a long and healthy career beyond that first job".

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of- java...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of- javaschools-2/)

<comment><USER4> > Then everyone is university'ing wrong!

Hey hey! I tend to agree!

Finding students a job should be a secondary byproduct of first giving them a world class education where you prepare and enable the student for society through being able to learn. Universities are to teach students how to learn so they can learn and be more aware and active about what is happening around them in society. Universities gives you exposure to a wide array of subjects for a purpose. It isn't random, and if you are attending a university where it does feel random, then find a better university.

"The goal of university education is to help build a fairer, more just society" \- Steven Schwartz. [0]

Indeed this aligns with Plato's view on education -- "Plato regards education as a means to achieve justice, both individual justice and social justice." [1]

[0]: [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/columnists/the-...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/columnists/the- higher-purpose/176727.article)

[1]: [http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations/AAI9517932/](http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations/AAI9517932/)

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, philosophically.

But when I apply this philosophy to concrete curriculum design questions in CS, I end up caring about placing students at internships and jobs.

First, internships are a form of education, and I find that students who complete internships come back the next Fall as much more mature programmers. I can then leverage that maturity in programming to dig deeper into interesting theory. Because I'm not helping debug for loops, I can students debug proofs or design more complex algorithms. So I consider internship placement a major goal for the first two years of a CS curriculum, even when my goal is to teach pure theory.

Second, I have a hard time justifying the situation where students are debt slaves to banks. How does that achieve individual or social justice?

Third, your work output is an enormous aspect of your contribution to society. Someone who can build a software platform that helps rural poor in Nigeria get access to micro-loans under a fair terms is making a much greater impact on the world than a philosopher with a perfect understanding of what it means for the world to be just, but without the means to act on that knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> " _There was a time when most people could make a career out of a skill, or stay within the same type of job, but workers today constantly need to adapt. They must become lifelong learners: Teach a student one skill and you got him one job; teach a student to learn and you got him lifetime employment._ "

It's far from clear to me that any beyond a small percentage of people generally, but perhaps Americans in particular, have the capacity to become lifelong learners. Not saying folks are stupid -- the problem isn't a lack of raw cognitive capacity, IMHO.

What actually makes someone a lifelong learner? Curiosity. If you don't _want_ to learn, it's going to be very difficult to do so, except perhaps while under the gun for short periods of time. And, unfortunately, our education system seems ideally tailored for stamping out children's natural curiosity. If that sounds overly pessimistic, I'd welcome a demonstration to the contrary.

I feel that the answer is basically "let's fix our education system," which I -- again, perhaps overly pessimistically -- believe to be politically impossible.

<comment><USER7> I kinda disagree. It is a long story. I will skip a lot and make it as brief as I can.

I used to own my own company. It has long since been sold and I am retired. We modeled traffic and I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age.

This was way back in the dark ages of the early 1990s, when you actually had to work to find people who could write good code. You also had to pay them a goodly amount of money.

One of the things I offered was to help with continued education. For example, we had one lady who was a secretary and she wanted to learn to code. So, we sent her to school part time, on our dime, and she eventually found a home in QA.

When we began to provision services in other areas, besides vehicular modeling for municipalities, I sent people to get the training they felt they needed. I'd even go with them, if I had time and it would benefit me. I love Defcon, and have gone even after retiring.

We'd get a local university to do some research and then poach the folks who stood out - and help them complete their education.

Quite a few acted on this and I have to say we benefited greatly from this. I don't have exact numbers but it was well over a third.

So, in my experience, they want the education. In my experience, they can be educated. Maybe try offering to pay for it, if you're in a position to make that choice? Cover their total costs - including ensuring they can afford the time.

In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did.

<comment><USER8> I think that your company had to send its employees off to formal education in a classroom (or similar) setting is indicative of the problem highlighted by the person you are replying to. Your employees would not have been anywhere near as successful with some combination of textbook, lectures on video (e.g. on VHS), and a study group made up of other employees. Lifelong learning means being able to acquire new knowledge and skills outside of the traditional educational setting.

Often, a University will claim that its students are not there to learn specific subjects but to learn how to learn. A lot of that learning is studying and solving problems outside of lecture time. These are the skills which are lacking because of a cultural perception that learning happens in a class.

<comment><USER7> I am addressing the part about not being lifelong learners. My experience suggests this is not quite accurate and that people will do so, if they can.

<comment><USER9> _> I am addressing the part about not being lifelong learners._

I'm not disagreeing with you but I do want to point out that your semantics of _" lifelong learner"_ is not the same as msluyter's:

msluyter's "lifelong learner": self-directed, self-motivated learning driven by _inner_ curiosity. Perhaps another word would be _auto-didact_ [1].

KGIII's "lifelong learner": the learner's brains can continue to receive new knowledge well into old age especially if an _outside_ factor (e.g. you the employer) provide structured education

Your definition isn't wrong... but it differs from msluyter's so you're talking past each other.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism)

<comment><USER10> The "motivated by curiousity" part should be irelevant imo and so should be preference for self direction as opposed preference for classroom setting.

More meaningful definition is the one about what the person does - continuously learning whole life. Whether it is curiosity or feeling of duty or attempt to mimic some role model in the past or pragmatical strategy should not matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, this is very true. Most companies aren't going to keep you long enough to spend lots of money to train you. In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. These days you're lucky if you are there for five. Training should really start at the high school level. It's a disgrace that most students graduate from 12+ years of school without the training to get a good job but they can attend a codecamp for 1 year and get a starting job as a coder. It's no wonder we have a large number of workers that feel the american dream is slipping away. They never learned the skills they need to survive and thrive in our current economic system.

What's even sadder is that leaders are not focusing in this part of the problem but instead in silliness like who uses what bathroom. Things need to change.

<comment><USER12> > In the old days you expected to be at the same company until you retired. > These days you're lucky if you are there for five.

It sounds like you want to shift the onus of training from the organization that benefits from the training to taxpayers and workers. Why is that? Why not try to shift the employer/employee leverage balance to incentivize employers to again train its labor force, provide long-term employment, and give an improving quality of life to its workers? It's not like people stopped being long-term employees for no reason. Employers stopped showing loyalty because they didn't need to anymore. Given the fact that wages have been stagnant since the 70's when trickle-down economics were enacted, yet large corporations have seen massive gains, wouldn't you say it's time for a different approach to the direction of our economy?

This is all also assuming that Americans need a combination of experience and education to get ahead, which is just false. Education does help, but only pockets of highly populated areas of the country are experiencing growth at the moment. The rest is stagnating or on the decline... But that is a different issue that involves the dissolution of anti-trust laws more than an employer/employee leverage shift[1].

[1] [http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom- and-...](http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I cringe when I hear about plans for "tuition-free" 4-year college. I went to a fancy private high school, with a bunch of kids who graduated and went to fancy private universities. From what I can tell, it's done very little for them. The people who aren't working in tech or finance are literally on food stamps, extending their time in college, doing something like Teach for America, or working retail jobs. _With 4-year degrees_.

As if that weren't agitating enough, universities seem to relish their role in "not providing job training" and being "not a vocational school" and "producing well-rounded students". The government shouldn't be footing the bill to send people to these schools (through subsidized loans or other mechanisms), which for most students are glorified daycare centers for young adults who don't want to join the workforce yet. It's a huge waste of money, as the current levels of student loan debt attests to.

I don't know all the details here but an apprenticeship program seems like a step in the right direction. The federal government should forgive student loans (lay the cost on the universities)

<comment><USER14> Problem is the university lobby is now massive. Tons of free money, using the only non-dischargable debt there is. The flaws in education are the flaws in politics at large - too much corruption that is too detached from the suffering of the commons. All major structural social issues trace back to a broken incentives structure and an absence of transparency and accountability at all levels that produce policy.

Of course, that means changing the framework of that decision making, which is constitutional. And the established structure is wholly intentional, it is not just some mistake the people just need to "wake up and realize is wrong, and then we can all fix it". There are antagonists who prosper under the establishment, who now wield controlling influence in all spheres.

The question for humanity in the 21st century looks to be how to fix that kind of structural misalignment of incentives towards the will of power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You could make the same argument from the worker's perspective. Companies don't need to hire graduates, they need to offer training for their employees! Why are we focused on what people should do when companies are the ones setting the bar?

<comment><USER16> The skills need to be non-transferable to other places, otherwise the company is just paying to supply their competitors with a better-trained workforce.

<comment><USER17> This a very dim, short-sighted view. Most large companies do have training programs and don't artificially limit the skills to ones that are not transferrable. Investing in the skills of your current employees can be far cheaper than trying to hire for those same skills.

Even in your worst case scenario you've presumably gotten some benefit from the employee before they depart and spent less than you would on a bad hire who has the desired skills (and therefore makes more).

If the result of your investments really is competitors with better trained employees then you have a higher skilled pool to recruit from when you need it. Plus, you've saved money in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Jobs are for machines, life is for people. How many of the 'jobs' realy contribute to a better world? You can't blame people wanting them regardless as we tied in their whole right to live with 'employment'. I'd say especially Americans could do with a broad scientific and cultural renaissance style education.

<comment><USER19> That's sweet and all but the rest of us have to pay rent

<comment> wu-ikkyu There are ~23 empty homes for every homeless person in the US[1].

For those of us living in the US, have you ever wondered why we have "housing crises" and such high rents when we have such an absurdly high surplus of empty homes?

[1][https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22336)

<comment><USER20> The problem is those empty homes aren't located where you want to live. Among cities in the US, Flint, Michigan has the highest home vacancy rate. Coinciding with that surplus, the median rent is more than a couple of hundred dollars per month below the national median.

If someone is feeling like there is a housing crisis in some part of the country, the obvious solution is to move to Flint, or another community with a similar surplus of housing and cheap rent. However, there is probably a good reason why they haven't already done so.

They've done the math and have realized that while rent may be higher, that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs, lifestyle, environment, etc.) and is actually worth every penny.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >that higher rent has much greater value (access to better jobs

Indeed, and this is getting to the point that the parent and I are making. The same system which ideologically mandates maximum employment, is the same one maintaining the artificially inflated housing prices.

<comment><USER20> But the economy always seeks equilibrium eventually. Rents are rising in places like San Francisco because it is trying to reach equilibrium with Flint. While it may take time to get there, eventually we should see rents reach a point where it is a better deal, or at least no worse of a deal, to live in Flint, even if the career opportunities are not as good.

For instance, as a hypothetical, if you make $70k post-tax as a developer in SF, or $15k working part time at Mcdonalds in Flint, once your rent reaches about $5,000/month, you may actually be better off in Flint career-wise. But in fact, the median household income in SF is only $88k/year (pre-tax), which means that there are probably people already living in SF who aren't far off being better off moving to Flint for career reasons (not necessarily for the other reasons listed).

<comment><USER21> This seems like kind of an absurd oversimplification. Maybe what you're saying is true over geologic timescales but if SF suddenly had a large amount of vacant housing, rents wouldn't continue to increase regardless of what's happening economically in Flint.

<comment><USER20> Why would SF suddenly have a large amount of vacant housing that isn't there now, unless people lost interest in the city? A large surplus like that suggests that things have swing too far in the other direction. At that point, rents will decline to try and bring equilibrium back the other way, exactly like you see in Flint today.

<comment><USER21> I don't know, overoptimistic real estate developers? My point is just that asserting that rents in SF are increasing because they are trying to reach some kind of equilibrium with Flint, MI obviously involves glossing over tons of factors that affect rents more in the short term. You might as well argue that rents in SF are rising because they are trying to reach equilibrium with the rents in rural villages in Mali

<comment><USER20> _> I don't know, overoptimistic real estate developers?_

If developers in SF become too optimistic then those homes become a drag on the economy, and SF soon loses the career advantage it currently has, still leading to equilibrium eventually.

 _> tons of factors that affect rents more in the short term._

I felt I was quite explicit that finding equilibrium takes time. I am not sure why you are focusing on short term movements in price.

 _> You might as well argue that rents in SF are rising because they are trying to reach equilibrium with the rents in rural villages in Mali_

In some ways that is true. China's rags to riches story happened in large part due to costs in the US rising to the point where it became cheaper to move (some) operations over there. Reaching equilibrium at the international scale is more difficult due to many artificial barriers found along the way, however. There is really nothing stopping an American citizen living in SF from moving to Flint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree to some extend, but for a lot of jobs the degree is your skill. I employ a lot of low level coders who are trained to do what we want them to do. Haven't had trouble finding those.

What I do have trouble finding is someone with the theoretical knowledge on how to utilize machine learning patterns, which design patterns, paradigms, techs and libraries we should use and why and so on.

<comment> happy-go-lucky There're people that have CS degrees but can't code. After learning the syntax of a language, anyone can write simple programs, and with some experience and dedication some can even write well-crafted code that others can use. What matters is one's approach to problem solving and this is learnable and you get better at it as and when you work on such stuff as machine learning, and if you've adaptability that's an advantage.

<comment><USER23> A CS degree isn't intended to teach students how to code. What did you expect?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Education in this country needs to be totally reformed. High school is basically day care in most places. No reason the average 4 year degree cannot be completed at ages 14-18. Then if people want to get a masters they can go ahead, but it shouldn't be expected like going off to college is.

<comment><USER25> Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable.

Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.

<comment><USER26> > I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last > mile of the prefrontal cortex.

From what research I've read, that is happening later than 15-20. Its more in the early to mid 20s.

<comment><USER25> That was the implication I was trying to make, I apparently failed in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No evidence to support the thesis. No special personal perspective to share the secret sauce.

The unfilled job number of 6 million is an interesting data point. I'll give them that. But a job does not equal having a good life.

In short, the only data point to take away from this is waste of time. Am I being harsh? Not as harsh as un-empathic, presumptive declarative what people in America need (by the way you need to provide evidence and support to make claims like this at least).

</comment><comment><USER28> Job training has been universally popular among US politicians for a long time, but the evidence that it helps people find work is weak. See

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute)

<comment><USER14> A lot of this is because nobody wants to be honest.

A huge portion of "vacant" jobs are companies that maintain listings for 10 year fully stack veterans while offering $60k a year salary. Unreasonable to anyone, but the point is to dangle the carrot in case you can get super lucky and nab talent at well below market rate. It doesn't cost you anything to keep the offer on the market. They are a great excuse to complain about vacancies, though.

If there were _real_ demand, truly authentic _honest_ demand for work, that wasn't a known fleeting thing, humans adapt. Human history is nothing if not the demonstration that people migrate towards opportunity. It might be considered on the order of days or generations, but people will do it. So don't sit around complaining about nobody wanting to move somewhere where the salary is "competitive" but you have rigged the externalities like taxes and property ownership so far against civilians your bafflement that nobody wants to go where the "jobs" are is dastardly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A useful point and one I make in this essay on boosting apprenticeships: [http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news- boost...](http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting- apprenticeships/). The "College for all, all the time and everywhere" mantra needs to end. College is great but is not a panacea.

</comment><comment><USER30> I heard that most American degrees are, in terms of knowledge and whatnot, worth a high school diploma from some European countries. Any truth to that at all?

<comment><USER31> The german realschulabschluss is similar to an american hs diploma. Students on the track towards university will add the abitur on top of this, which is similar in depth and difficulty to an undergraduate degree at an american comunity college. Which is why Germany doesn't have pre-med, pre-law etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from "where did you study?" to "what can you do?".

But are they really? Go look at job openings. You will find more often than not 'X degree required' (or at least recommended). If you don't have a degree, your application will often go straight into the trash, before the question "what can you do?" is asked.

<comment> ju-st Two recruiters from Switzerland recently told me that the only things that matters is your study programme (should fit the one given in job opening) and your degree (B.Sc/M.Sc). Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs. "What can you do" or whatever you did while in college increases only the chances of getting hired. But having basic programming skills is usually already enough to get an offer.

<comment><USER3> > Salary is non negotiable for entry level jobs

I can assure you that our students (Holberton) do negotiate their entry-level jobs. The majority successfully do so :)

> the only things that matters is your study programme and your degree

When we started we had no track record whatsoever. Our first students found internships but also jobs everywhere including both completely unknown and super cool startup and very high-profile companies such as NASA, Apple etc... they were all selected on what they could do and not on a degree (we are not accredited) nor the school itself (we had no track record)

Today we atart to have a very good reputation so the problem is different, our atudents don't have to fight anymore, companies come to them. But for the first students it was very clear that ppl didn't care about degrees or "where do you come from".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a New York Times article today (6/28/17) about the idea of skills vs. degrees.

> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs- > skil...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/tech-jobs-skills- > college-degree.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> When I was in High School, I went to 2 years of Vocational School at the same time and took advanced studies for college so I'd have something to fall back on one way or the other.

<comment><USER35> What vocational trade?

<comment><USER34> Industrial and Residential Electricity. We learned mainly residential but our instructor wanted us to be prepared for industrial as well. In the end, I was accepted to a small college but didn't want to work a FT job and attend college so I went into the Navy instead, into the AEF (Advanced Electronics Field).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> These articles for the most part live off of an imagined past. It wasn't hard to train someone to work an assembly line, which used to be all you needed to do.

Skilled employment such as plumbing electrical had and still have apprenticeships...

</comment><comment><USER37> Can critical thinking and debate skills be taught? Throw in some geopolitics and I can support the idea...</comment>


Mountain Lion, AirPlay, Screen Captures & DRM  - <AUTHOR> http://rud.is/b/2012/05/15/mountain-lion-airplay-screen-captures-drm/

<comment><USER2> This isn't necessarily an indictment toward DRM.

Hardware-accelerated video is (used to be?) done using hardware video overlays. You'd pipe frames directly to the video card and tell it what region of the screen to render it to, completely independent of the regular 2D or 3D rendering path. On 2D Windows desktops, you'll see this as a magenta square when you take a screenshot, because the 2D windowing system only knows about the elements plus the "hole" where the overlay goes; it has no way to access the pixels in the hardware overlay buffer.

The author mentions sending the video through AirPlay by sending the _entire desktop_ , rather than using iTunes to send the video directly. If QuickTime Player is rendering the video using a hardware overlay, this makes just as much sense that it would fail as does the screenshot case.

I'd be curious to know if sending it via iTunes works fine.</comment>