The best programming languages work like and use the same parts of the brain that reading and writing do. It is no surprise that the language of mathematics reads left to right, uses Latin symbols, and roughly follows European languages in grammar and syntax. (In certain parts of the Arab-speaking world, some mathematical expressions are written left to right, but this is not universal.)

As the syntaxes of programming languages become more elaborate, the cognitive load involved in programming increases. As other parts of the brain become involved, programming error rates increase, not to mention the common sense notion that completely learning the language becomes unachievable for most people and every programmer works with his or her own subset making code maintenance difficult.

C++ with its feature-packed templates makes people who love a language to have every concept from computer science packed into it happy, but it doesn't serve programmers and hence humanity very well.

The ideal programming interface is you telling the computer exactly what you want it to do in English, not the the opposite. We're decades away from an AI that can automatically write code, but making the programmer's link to the computer more difficult to convey unambiguous instructions seems to be going in the opposite direction.

Concrete contributed to the rise of Rome, and this part of Rome remains today because concrete laid by Romans is still being used in 2014.

Slashdot is written in Roman Latin letters. Hundreds of millions of people speak modern versions of Rome's Latin language. The language of modern science and medicine is Latin.

Did Rome really fall or are we Roman?

The biggest danger from nuclear is acute exposure and death to thousands and perhaps millions of human and humanlike species in the future as storage facilities are pilfered over the next 1,000,000-10,000,000 years.

How many of you could read a warning written in cuneiform? That language is one of the earliest known languages and is only about 5,000 years old. Let's say that most people in the world can probably only read a language that's 500 years old or less, and may struggle with earlier written versions, if there were any. Maybe you're lucky enough to read 2000+ year old Hebrew. But that's just one language. What about all of the other written languages from 2,000 years ago? And what about cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Greek? Ancient Chinese?

How in the hell are people supposed to read warnings written in any 2014 Earth language 50,000 years into the future, let alone 500,000 years into the future? That's 10 and 100 times longer than we've written down any language. 5,000,000 years of intelligibility is what we really need. That's why I see a nuclear holocaust to come not from a detonation but from innocent explorers long disconnected from our language and culture.

Earth will only be safe until all nuclear waste is off the planet, or we come up with a way to transform it into substances no more dangerous than what was on this planet before the nuclear age. We cannot assume constant technological progress for millions of years. The entire lifespan of our species is only 200,000 years, and only 70,000 years ago we nearly went extinct.

1994 was the year I first installed Linux. By that point, there were a number of complete Linux distributions. I got my start with Slackware 2.0.

So he was definitely around for the open source movement, so to speak. It was off most peoples' radar screens in 1994. This site got its start in 1997. I think I joined in 1998.

This isn't gentrification. This is super rich people pushing out very rich people, as compared to everybody else in the country.

If you're paying more than $1,500/month rent to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're very rich. If you're paying $2,500/month to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're super rich. The last time any poor people lived in San Francisco was the 1960's.

The rest of the US population not living in San Francisco doesn't have very much sympathy for you, except maybe the unfortunate souls living in Boston or New York.

I use the terms very rich and super rich, but feel free to substitute "less affluent upper middle class" and "more affluent upper middle class," if it makes you feel any better.

I've not liked some of the things I've heard from Mr. de Raadt in the past because they seemed to be less fact than emotion, but in this case Theo has redeemed himself in a big way.

Like it or not, OpenSSL is now one of the most important pieces of software in the world. OpenSSL protects people's bank account numbers, credit card numbers, medical records, and employment records. OpenSSL protects corporate and government secrets (hopefully in combination with other defensive tactics). OpenSSL is not used for all encrypted network sockets, but it is widespread, to say the least.

de Raadt and his team are stripping OpenSSL down to its bare minimum. That is exactly what we all need. When someone's device creates an encrypted HTTP connection to another device, you want that functionality to work perfectly. That is the vast majority of use cases, and that most important use of OpenSSL failed in a spectacular fashion.

You don't care about being able to build OpenSSL on anything right now except OpenBSD. That is the platform de Raadt's team will be using for testing. You don't care about high-performance wrappers. Computers are lightning fast now, have gigantic amounts of memory, and network speeds are phenomenal compared to the requirements of using an HTTPS connection. OpenSSL today does not want for any system resource, even on a telephone or an embedded platform.

You don't need a platform on which to perform experiments in cryptography. OpenSSL was being used by scientists and mathematicians and the NSA to test new ideas. That is not an appropriate use for the mainline OpenSSL distribution.

Once de Raadt's team is finished, one or more of the hundreds of thousands of Windows programmers can spend a few weeks re-adding their build architecture and necessary wrappers for the latest versions of Windows and some Linux people can do the minor porting on that platform.

Perhaps the original OpenSSL can be relegated back to the laboratory. If you've ever used the OpenSSL command line programs, it feels like you're working with test tubes and bunsen burners. From what I've read of the code, it is no better.

Here's my opinion on apocalyptic planning. You're wasting your energy. We've been predicting that the apocalypse is right around the corner since the dawn of civilization.

Prepare yourself for _likely_ (mathematically probable) scenarios. If you're 40 or under, prepare yourself for the possibility of dying or being seriously injured in an automobile accident. Buy the safest vehicle you can afford, because this is your leading cause of death. If you're over 40, take measures to prevent yourself from dying of heart disease by eating right and getting more exercise.

A cache of guns and a bomb shelter full of provisions won't do you any good if you're obese and you die of heart attack at age 55. Nor will it do you much good if you're in your late 20's and you die in a car crash on the way to Wal-Mart to purchase rifles and canned food.

Continue doing whatever you're doing because if something serious like an asteroid hits Earth, you're already dead. Anything serious like that will completely rewrite all the rules for life, and you can't predict what you will need. Maybe the only thing you will need is genetic resistance to the diseases that will run rampant. Or the ability to hide. Or the ability to relax and not worry. Or the ability to accept death.

Let's take a step back and consider what systemd has given us compared to what we had before.

Before systemd, configuring what gets started on Linux systems was standard across all distributions, dating back to before 1995, when I started developing software with Linux. There was /etc/rc.d/init.d or in some cases /etc/init.d and in most cases there were links in rc1.d, rc2.d, rc3.d, etc. It was that simple. Nothing ever broke.

With systemd, a solution in search of a problem, everything changed. Now you have all of these directory hierarchies and countless old bugs that take years to get resolved. For example, "network restart" was broken in Fedora for ages for a machine of mine with one DHCP Ethernet interface and two static Ethernet interfaces (with nothing fancy like wireless). "network restart" fails on a variety of machines I have access to; forget about "network reload." ifcfg-eth0 and the like are simple things, some of the most basic boot-related operations. I've tried to open bugs but the problem seems to be buried somewhere in the guts of systemd.

I've had systems rendered unbootable during upgrades because of silent failures trying to make a good initrd. It's too complex to get everything right with systemd. For a long, long time when the boot scripts died with systemd there was no obvious way to see any errors. Recently they added some more debugging output suggesting that you use journalctl. Why didn't they tell us about that earlier? The reason? No documentation. They wrote an entirely new way to boot the system but kept the design in their heads. Maybe, many years later, there is some scant documentation available (except for that one old useless design document justifying systemd's existence that everyone has read). Of course, nobody writes man pages anymore but they were sure to remove the man pages for the old boot system.

So what new things does systemd give us? Pretty much nothing except for bugs. Maybe there are a few oddball use cases like booting off of weird media, but most people today boot off of a fixed hard drive that doesn't change in years. 19 years later it might be an SSD, but that is the same use case.

It will add $150 to the cost of the car, but when it fails the dealership will charge $500 for the same part plus labor to replace it.

Nobody trades like this, and nobody traded like this in the early 2000s. That trading style has been obsolete for 20 years, and predates HFT. You don't see something, decide you want that, and then hit Enter or click your mouse button.

In this example, you decide the maximum price you want to pay in advance, and you enter a limit order. If you're selling you decide upon your minimum selling price, and in the same way you enter a limit order. You've locked in your profit, regardless of timing.

If you're setting up some sort of combination, you enter the triggering parameters in advance, and you don't even need to see what was being done on screen.

People say that computers are trading with each other. That is false. That's like saying that Microsoft Word writes documents. Trading companies, their traders, and their programmers write trading software and adjust parameters. 30 years ago, the "software" was held in the traders' minds, and the execution was done via outcry. The underlying mathematics is the same, and traders don't have to hold these calculations in their minds.

The problem here is this. Extremely rich companies can have the fastest links to the exchanges, but this is no different from the olden days where the oldest and richest companies had the smartest and most well-connected traders. The tools of the trade are slightly different, but rich and successful companies will leverage their money to be the most successful, or else they will be replaced by somebody else.

My own background is that I wrote a derivative trading system between 1999-2006 for a tiny company that ultimately didn't make it because we couldn't compete against the big boys. This angst about HFT is largely technophobia. The traders trade, they learn the software, and they often don't understand how it works. To programmers like me, the algorithms are a black box, but the traders do understand the mathematics pretty well. When you have traders coming out against HFT, you have traders who couldn't understand the software or were burned because their companies weren't rich enough.

People who have never worked in this field who are against HFT really don't understand computer-based trading very well, from either a programmer's perspective or a trader's perspective. Keep in mind that the job of a computer is to make mundane things happen more quickly, so we can focus on more human things. You want your 401K to execute as accurately-priced trades as possible. HFT ensures that both styles of trading benefit.

The Great Lakes region has a significant percentage of the US's population and I would not consider it "way too risky."

Southeast Michigan, part of this region, has around 5.5 million people. We haven't had a significant natural disaster that I'm aware of in the last 100 years or more. We are not subject to tsunamis or earthquakes. We're far away from the ocean and fault lines. We aren't subject to volcanoes or rock slides. This region is flat; no mountains here. Remnants of hurricanes cause little more than some rain. We don't have the kinds of tornadoes you see in the central plains states. We might have one tornado every few years that causes a handful of deaths. We're not prone to severe flooding. We're used to minor floods that drain into the Great Lakes. They're simply an annoyance. It doesn't get very hot here, so you're not going to die of heatstroke. By the same token, due to the effect of the lakes, it doesn't get very cold here compared to other states at this latitude. In the southeast we don't get much snow, either. The snow dies out crossing the state.

In the pre-Columbian days, Michigan's lower peninsula had a large Native population, for very good reason.

Hi, you would be right except there is definitely something punitive in the settlement. Both formal security audits and formal certification procedures are very expensive to small business. If you have only a handful of developers and the audit or certification takes him out of circulation for 3-6 months that's very expensive. Even having your developers distracted by the necessarily niggling and picky auditors is expensive even if they aren't on it full time.

Okay, SSL has its flaws. But if you say SSL and don't have validation turned on then you're lying. If you don't believe in SSL then don't use it. Encrypt contents, but don't screw that up. A PCI-compliant installation might use SSL, encrypt the credit card data using a public key, and decrypt using a private key only on a server accessible via two-factor authentication. SSL is only one layer of the onion.

I'll bow out after this one. Thanks for the good discussion.

This should be a lesson: If somebody is having trouble connecting with you, or you're under some kind of deadline pressure and you can't connect to them, don't turn off SSL validation. Get your connection working properly before going live. Because once you go live, you won't want to/may not be able to properly set up SSL.

I thought the same thing, but it might depend upon the specific alloy.