wtbob

30 ms·

301.
by wtbob 10y ago
It's entirely possible for Signal to work with contacts and yet not transmit address books to OWS. I sketched out a protocol for doing so awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 So people could use t
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by wtbob 10y ago
And here's my write-up of how a private set-intersection protocol could be used to enable users to securely swap contacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 It's a solved problem, but Signal doesn&#x27
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by wtbob 10y ago
That is definitely a much greyer case at the moment; I'm looking forward to the results of the investigation. It definitely sounds bad.
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by wtbob 10y ago
I can't answer for RHSeeger, but I like to watch movies on DVD, because the streaming options (particularly Netflix) are so horrible.
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by wtbob 10y ago
I am also very unhappy with the direction Signal has gone, but there's currently no alternative. I'd be interested in contributing to work attempting to replicate it, though.
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by wtbob 10y ago
Taleb is always a great read!
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The lost children of 'Runaway Train'(melmagazine.com)
2 points by wtbob 10y ago|0 comments
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by wtbob 10y ago
> What's the alternative, assuming that you can't reach into peoples' heads and change their positions on an issue? Supermajority voting on all legislation & referenda? After all, 2/3 of the population forcing 1&
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by wtbob 10y ago
Why do you assume all questions are answerable by science? Science says that if you assemble materials in a particular way you will get a solar panel, and if you assemble other materials in a different way then you get a toaster; it can&#x
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by wtbob 10y ago
I'm actually beginning to think that we should require a 2/3 majority for simple legislation and a 3/4 majority for amendments. Maybe it'd help nip a lot of problems in the bud. Or just create new ones …
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by wtbob 10y ago
> even peaceful protests are met with full riot gear and ends being peaceful as soon as that first baton-swing hits someone's skull. Is it more likely that a police baton ends the peace, or a protester's stone? Is riot gear of
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by wtbob 10y ago
Only an idiot thinks that the justice system never convicts and punishes the innocent. Only an idiot thinks any justice system which convicts and punishes anyone will never make mistakes (the only process to never punish the innocent is
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by wtbob 10y ago
There's more than one person sentenced to death in Texas: it's thus mathematically impossible for the governor to spend 100% of his time on each capital case. There's more than one person in prison in Texas: surely those pris
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by wtbob 10y ago
> There is not much upside for a woman to be featured in a national "rape on campus" story. You risk becoming the subject of internet hate and death threats in exchange for basically no personal gain. I disagree that there&#x27
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by wtbob 10y ago
Tobacco is a plant! A wonderfully aromatic plant …
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by wtbob 10y ago
> Come on, you don't go to a mall with a pencil, a brick or a bow and kill 50+ people. Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are kille
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by wtbob 10y ago
I wish that they'd support secure contact sharing. And non-phone-number IDs.
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by wtbob 10y ago
> Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no more and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to believe at that particular time. Unfortunately that's true (and Justice Scalia was comp
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by wtbob 10y ago
Ah, but what if South Carolina hadn't been so stupid as to shell Fort Sumter? That was the actual start of the war, and was a perfectly legitimate casus belli for the United States.
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by wtbob 10y ago
> Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member states are NOT free to leave. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by th
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by wtbob 10y ago
> Because the Islamic golden age ended when their cities were razed by the mongols to the ground. That was certainly part of it, but it was also because they managed to burn through the cultural & intellectual capital they had captur
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by wtbob 10y ago
> I only meant that Emacs requires a huge amount of configuration to reach the functionality of, say, PyCharm for Python. Eh, out of the box you're right, but I'd advise most folks to just install prelude (or if they're co
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by wtbob 10y ago
> I just don't think I write code in any languages where the IDE is not great Well, neither do we emacs-users: every language we write in has an amazingly great IDE, because emacs is our IDE for every language. And, other than go-m
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by wtbob 10y ago
> Multiple editors would have been an issue for me a few years ago, but JetBrains has changed that (for the set of languages I use, anyway). I can use the same IDE for a bunch of different ecosystems. Exactly. Now, imagine being able to
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by wtbob 10y ago
> BTW, I'm not sure at all why they ditched MagSafe. They did all this and kept the RCA port. Now that's a head scratcher. It makes sense to me: we'll have RCA ports long, long after MagSafe, USB and FireWire are nothing b
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by wtbob 10y ago
emacs:-) Honestly I'd rather write Common Lisp in emacs talking to PostgreSQL and fronted by NGINX than C++ in Visual Studio talking to SQLServer and fronted by IIS.
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by wtbob 10y ago
Yeah, but it's still Windows, with all the pain it entails. Why throw off one boot on your neck for another?
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by wtbob 10y ago
> It was developers who led the way to Apple's dominance in the notebook space, and I suspect it will be developers who lead the migration in the opposite way. I don't think any serious developer wants to use Windows, but … may
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by wtbob 10y ago
> We have about 150+ engineers with Macs - and precisely zero of them asked for a desktop versus a MacBook Pro. Given that they're using glossy-screened laptops — maybe they care more about looks and hipness than about getting the j
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by wtbob 10y ago
I honestly wonder if a little corruption and so-called 'honest graft' might actually be cheaper and lead to better results than what we have now.

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