Agree with this. I’ve hired hundreds of software engineers and I don’t give a flying flip where you went to school or even if you got a degree. What I do care about is whether or not you can do the job, and that comes from actually doing the job (whether you’ve been paid to or have pursued your own projects). Most new grads are totally useless TBH. I’ll take a GitHub showing you’re passionate about building and a solid interview over a robot with a degree nine times out of ten.
I don't really care to argue this point so I'll just explain why I find this extremely problematic. What percentage of browser users have any concept of how TLS works? This an exceedingly low number. You're essentially creating a dragnet to capture and decrypt the contents of transfers for a huge number of people who likely have no idea that they're volunteering their (sensitive) information. Browser users are not TLS experts. They will click right through warnings without a second thought. No, this standard doesn't harm the very small minority of people capable of protecting themselves. It only takes advantage of everyone else. This is why, to me, dismissing this off-hand as no big deal is seriously negligent. Yes, I've read the draft. Yes I have the technical experience and qualifications to understand fully what it proposes. And yes, I believe this is an egregious thing to propose.
I agree ... many PHP devs seem to think that programming only exists between when the web server gives a request to a PHP process and when that process closes it's STDOUT handle to complete the response.
The problem with this is you can accomplish essentially the same thing in userland if you know how to write a good "compiled regex" ... Calling the pcre functions in C land gains you very little. An extension is totally unnecessary.
I tend to agree with your position. The fundamentals of individual microeconomic decision-making are much more sound IMHO than their extrapolation to large-scale macroeconomic systems. At the macro scale I believe the system is far more complex than we can correctly model with anything but rough approximation. Otherwise, we'd already know exactly when/why/how future recessions and booms would occur. The High Frequency Trading question, though, exists entirely within the micro sphere where the math is rock-solid. As such, I've yet to encounter a logical refutation for its use.
I can appreciate your reasoning. I know you aren't suggesting this, but the popular blanket conclusion that HFT is bad because anomalies like "flash-crashes" sometimes occur is misguided. It's equivalent to saying we should outlaw highways because of an occasional traffic-jam or 12-car-pileup. On the whole, the benefits to the economy (and therefore, individuals) resulting from HFT far outweigh the costs. It's never a good idea to throw out the baby with the bath water and I've yet to encounter a nuanced mathematical argument (backed by concrete data) to demonstrate how the economy is harmed by more efficient markets.
But math isn't. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; mine just happened to result from the mathematical proofs I was forced to study and write for the postulations of that "bullshit field." I would also submit that your argument ignores the law of leaky abstractions (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...) ... All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. Finally, economics doesn't assume people "[act] at all times to consume as much as possible without regard to relationships." It assumes that individual actors make decisions that maximize their utility. Utility can result from completely selfless acts -- it's whatever makes you happy. "Selfishness" does not rule out actions that benefit others or society at large. This argument exemplifies the misunderstanding of "basic economic principles" referenced in my original comment.
As a programmer with an economics degree, I'm thrilled to see articles like these on HN ... popular media outlets do a terrible job of explaining how these systems work and usually devolve into generalizations like "HFT is evil and you should hate it" because they don't understand basic economic principles.