fab13n

21 ms·

121.
by fab13n 12y ago
Ostensibly, they've sold it back years ago. But that just means they don't need to officially own it anymore: Alex Mandl, Gemalto's current chairman, is among others a former board member of intQtel, which presents its missio
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by fab13n 12y ago
> reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened. No kidding, they've been bought, under more-than-suspicious circumstances, by [inQtel]( https://www.iqt.org/ ) and [Texas Partner Gr
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by fab13n 12y ago
> OpenPGP SDK code looks like OpenSSL. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that intelligence services sabotage open source crypto projects by helping turning their codebase into an arcane mess, which scares away the million eyeballs wh
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by fab13n 12y ago
It's not about GPG sucking; it's about the absence of anything sucking less than GPG. It's not about activists and journalists being (more or less) able to use GPG; it's about the fact that nobody who doesn't face a
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by fab13n 12y ago
I'm on a French canal, and I wish we had a continuous cruising status. It would keep canals alive, force boats to be maintained in working condition, and drive off most people who see liveaboard boats as an alternative to a flat. Unfor
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by fab13n 12y ago
> this woman in the article wasn't living on a barge she'd have spent £20m on a 10 bedroom mansion on Bishops Avenue. Of course you're kidding, and you realize that she'd probably share it with 4 friends and borrow on
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by fab13n 12y ago
I would have said "tax whatever behavior you want to discourage": 1. tax unoccupied houses as punishingly as you'd tax pot or alcohol; in touristic places, such as Tahiti and Thailand, they went even further and outlawed land
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by fab13n 12y ago
It's more the sociological Internet-savvyness which strikes me as unlikely than the technical feat. Besides, we don't know the relative importance of computer hacking skills vs. social engineering vs. victim incompetence in the br
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by fab13n 12y ago
It's hard indeed to believe that anyone raised and living in DPRK would get the skills, technical and social, demonstrated in this hack. But it's not impossible that such a non-Korean person has been funded and helped by DPRK, eit
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by fab13n 12y ago
TL;DR: a healthy brain accumulates wisdom, but won't bother archiving the sources of that wisdom.
131.
by fab13n 12y ago
Your comment addresses many things at once, some insightful, others more botched IMO. However I find them wrong in a very interesting way, so let me try to counter them. First, seeing "programming" as a generalised activity is bar
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by fab13n 12y ago
> healthcare does reimburse less each year The part that matters is the one about serious conditions: accidents, cancers, infarctus etc. Paying a few hundreds a months to get a few thousands back when you break a tooth or your glasses is
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by fab13n 12y ago
> you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%. Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for free
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by fab13n 12y ago
In Europe, car is rarely the best way to move around. Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.
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by fab13n 12y ago
> These things happen in private sector organizations too It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become. * I
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by fab13n 12y ago
An interesting post on an infrequent topic gets people to Google around for this topic, and to find more postworthy stuff. You won't get this effect with, say, a new PG essay, because everything loosely related to PG has already been p
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by fab13n 12y ago
FP isn't a new thing in academia. But having it used in practical conditions, by companies intended to make money and writing "normal" software (i.e. not things related to formal semantics), is still really newsworthy. And th
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by fab13n 12y ago
The snark wasn't necessary indeed, and as an early-stage project, lacking documentation is understandable. As an HN post however, if you tease us with "magical features" in the title, I'd expect to have the magic shown t
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by fab13n 12y ago
"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law." This guy has it exactly wrong: it allows people to place themselves beyond the illegal snooping of NSA
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by fab13n 12y ago
To paraphrase Bill Gates, measuring wealth production by hours of work is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, m
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by fab13n 12y ago
> Why not? Because capitalism. I believe you're mostly true. I can only see one slim chance for things to turn out better than expected: most capitalists get rich by making not-so-useful crap that can only be bought by plebes enjoyi
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by fab13n 12y ago
> China will continue to work 6 or 7 days [...] and the reserve currency will be the yuan. You suppose that wealth production is proportional to the number of hours worked. This used to be an oversimplification, and now becomes simply fa
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by fab13n 12y ago
Admittedly, the biggest news is that they might produce a cogeneration heater for <$10K. A nice thing with cogeneration is that it works best when photovoltaic panels work the least. My case isn't typical, I live on a boat in Europe
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by fab13n 12y ago
> wouldn't make sense unless they also included taxes. Or simply give salaries net of taxes. In many countries, a large chunk of the taxes are paid by enterprises, and never appear on your salary sheets, although they're part o
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by fab13n 12y ago
True, and another key component, which will become even more important once median incomes are taken into account, is public services. For instance Paris is described to be about as expansive as San Francisco. But in Paris, you have your ki
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by fab13n 12y ago
> I'd also request that the licensing party grant a reciprocal bulk license to Tesla as well. That what I thought "in good faith" meant.
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by fab13n 12y ago
> [it's reasonable not to commit to long-term API support lightly] Another dimension, which I think primes here, is potential for abuse: things either likely to be used for scammy features, or leading to 99% of results in very poor
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by fab13n 12y ago
Disrupting the ecosystem is precisely what we're trying to do here, so I hope it would :)
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by fab13n 12y ago
I don't know how Lapis does it, but it's not difficult to write a coroutine-cloning function in C for Lua: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-01/threads.html#00650 , cf. thread "coroutine.clo
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by fab13n 12y ago
> GPL [...] prevents anybody but the original author from making those pro versions. This is only true as long as they accept no 3rd party contribution. In this case, accepting 3rd party modules is a crucial feature, so GPL+commercial wo

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