What I'm reading 2/22-2/29

2016-02-29

"While many of these folks are directly impacted by class inequality and do realize it, they are likely not spending their days and nights reading Karl Marx, educating themselves on the intricacies of capitalism. They do not sit around pondering the effects of 'problematic behaviours' in radical communities. They are not concerned with checking their privilege. No. They are busy trying to survive."
"But I would go as far as saying that the politically correct mafia on the left perpetuates a form of bigotry on its own because it alienates and 'otherizes' those who do not share their ways of thinking and speaking about the world."
"Speaking of Fascism, there is also a disturbing trend on the left nowadays that involves rejecting free speech/freedom of expression as a core value, because that speech could possibly be hurtful to someone, somewhere."
"Folks, do the world a favour…stop with the safe spaces and trigger warnings, and get serious about changing the world."

"The Secretary: '...If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.'"

"Between January and July 2014, a large number of malicious nodes operated on the Tor network, with the purpose, according to the Tor Project, of deanonymising dark web sites and their users."
"[CMU Software Engineering Institute] researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord were due to present research at the Black Hat hacking conference in August 2014 on how to unmask the IP addresses of Tor hidden services and their users, before the talk was suddenly canceled without explanation."

"Natsios: It's a serious conflict of interest. They've written themselves into the story as heroes, co-heroes of the story. It's a conflict of interest. They're not at a distance from their source. They've embedded themselves in the narrative, and therefore all decisions are highly suspect because they benefit from the outcome of the narrative in every sense."

"In Clojure, you primarily care about two things: data and functions. You pass data to functions and get new data back."
"'But wait a minute,' you might be thinking, 'You can't just pass data around like that. Haven't you read POODR? What about encapsulation? What if those functions mutate your data?'"

"At first I refused to look up the term intersectionality. It seemed like one of those terms reserved for wealthy college types with zero real life experience."
"Who would be selfish enough to consider their individual experiences... individual experiences?"
"Your direct experiences are merely a social construct."

"It is not endorsed by Paul Graham, isn't backed by Andreesen Horowitz, doesn't have a profitless business model, doesn't throw decadent $7m holiday parties, and its formed by a bunch of intellectuals, not people who wrestle over drinks in a steakhouse."
"Jetbrains core tech comprises of incremental parsers and lexers written in Java rendered on a desktop using Swing APIs. There is no Big Data, Hadoop, Kafka, NodeJS or any other 'sexy' technologies in use."

"Since the State won't do what's right by it's citizens (and no, squashing their civil liberties into dust and telling them it's for their own good isn't what's right), citizens and private enterprise (while it still exists) will react to these realities in their own way. As they should."

"Distributed system development is not going to become a part of every application developers daily life because it is a massive pain in the ass."
"MapReduce programming is almost always single-threaded. Concurrency is managed by the framework. The last thing that would help you write good MapReduce programs is more user-level concurrency primitives."