221–230 of 308 posts
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but nonetheless true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The essay isn't confusing in general just because you were confused when you read it. There isn't a single argument in that essay that depends on which flavor of encrypted email is used, so being specific about that would only weaken the points being made. The essay is also pretty clear in saying that email can be used for stuff that doesn't need to be kept secret, and that it's not fit for anything that does.
So is it saying that big email providers like GMail shouldn't opportunistically encrypt email in transit or at rest? Or that we should avoid email services that do? Clearly not as there is no harm in it, the UI is unchanged, and it prevents certain attacks. You have to know that by "encrypted email" means "end-to-end encrypted email" to make any sense of the essay, otherwise the claim is too broad. It states the clai…
And then you realize that things like "providers opportunistically encrypting in transit or at rest" are largely irrelevant to having truly secure communications. You could have a conversation about "is Gmail less bad than Outlook.com" or whatever, but the whole point of the essay is that neither are meaningfully different if you have important secrets.
Interestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people getting mad at the certainty of an essay in this very site, a few days ago. Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge. That interaction was very refreshi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you derived the idea axiomatically?
sighs No, but if you think I’m full of shit, I don’t really want to waste my time discussing how I developed this particular misunderstanding about the world for your amusement.
My English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing. Over time I found this unwieldy and now I find myself re-reading my sentences to see what I can delete. It's satisfying, like deleting unused code in a messy codebase. I envy writers who manage to densely pack information in sentences that are beautiful to read.
> My English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing. Same here, and I suspect the same for most people: "due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature" --- http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html Toward the end of high school I found The Elements of Style by accident and it changed my life. Yes, it changed my life! I was always more interested…
In addition, I design my programs such that I can confidently rewrite important sections. This is OOP encapsulation's main purpose. In practice, everyone writes getters and setters until every object is an ugly struct.
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Agreed. In my opinion, great writing has to be within the context of the time. A lot of us speak in a manner similar to how PG writes. You wouldn't consider great writing from 1890 with the same set of rules as you would something written in 2020.
Roald Dahl's work is some of the most delightfully readable and engaging writing out there in my humble opinion and that was written nearly one hundred years ago in the 1930s and 1940s. Good writing is timeless, I may suggest that adding hyperlinks under a new word you introduced inside your essay that requires clicking on and reading a wholly different story to understand the current story you are reading, is a terr…
> I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay.
I wouldn't say he's really using "+" instead of "&". "importance & novelty & correctness & strength" doesn't provide the same feeling of adding, of mixing, to get a formula.
Interestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people getting mad at the certainty of an essay in this very site, a few days ago. Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge. That interaction was very refreshi…
I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point, though. What I most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that term is commonly used in English). I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg. (Someone rather bad at it, usually arg…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is it saying that big email providers like GMail shouldn't opportunistically encrypt email in transit or at rest? Or that we should avoid email services that do? Clearly not as there is no harm in it, the UI is unchanged, and it prevents certain attacks. You have to know that by "encrypted email" means "end-to-end encrypted email" to make any sense of the essay, otherwise the claim is too broad. It states the clai…
If you read the essay, the scenarios being considered and the type of security desired are pretty clear from the examples. And then you realize that things like "providers opportunistically encrypting in transit or at rest" are largely irrelevant to having truly secure communications. You could have a conversation about "is Gmail less bad than Outlook.com" or whatever, but the whole point of the essay is that neither…
There are meaningful differences in the scale of access. It matters whether the NSA (or China or whoever) can just read everyone's email off the network, versus law enforcement sending requests to email providers where they are verified to be legal. It's the difference between lawful access and espionage.
The other day I was helping friend with an essay and i realized how 12 years in software programming has changed my writing style. Now it seems very awkward to think and write in long paragraphs. It feels more natural to use bullet points for everything.
I know the feeling; when preparing to write a blog post or a presentation I tend to start off with bullet points. Mind you once I have that down I can churn out improbable amounts of text in a relatively short amount of time. The main challenge for me is to stop writing and remove unnecessary text, which is kinda hard to do given how much nuance is in code. I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge…
There's a (generally) younger cohort at Handmade Network[0] that might be interested in your essay. I'd encourage you to make an account and post it on a new thread :-)