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"Accelerated C++" is a fantastic book if you wish to pick-up idiomatic C++ quickly.

16son Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

The sun is going to burn out some day. When that happens, no one will care about ocean acidity.

16son The Government Shutdown on the Web

Where I'm from Tech means Virginia Tech. We beat Georgia Tech in football this year too ;)

Just joking... thanks for that write-up. I'd rather keep the Internet away from Radio (it's too centralized). I much prefer station to station communication over the air rather than packets over some government/corporate controlled network.

16son The Government Shutdown on the Web

The FCC is down. As a radio operator, I find this extremely disappointing: http://www.fcc.gov

16son Lavabit founder turned over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout

And also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases).

If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out.

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazett...

16son Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU

God bless Gnu. Best thing that ever happened to Free Software,

16son The Bonehead Mistake That Brought Down an Online Drug-Dealing Empire

I know he has been accused of doing very bad things. I just hate to see Tor and its users vilified like this. Bad people use Tor for bad things, but good people use it for good things too.

And making people feel that simply asking questions about Tor will put them in the same category as hardcore criminals is just wrong. We're not all heartless criminals. In fact, most just want a bit of privacy.

16son The Bonehead Mistake That Brought Down an Online Drug-Dealing Empire

I've posted questions about Tor on stackoverflow using my real name, but I'm not a criminal nor do I have any desire to be a criminal.

It seems odd to me that questions like this on a technology site could somehow be used to incriminate people. Maybe the goal is to prevent people from asking questions.

What you ask can and will be used against you?

16son The Indian and his insatiable appetite for the college degree

I really dislike articles that generalize based on race, religion, sex, etc. It's inappropriate and says nothing about individuals (all of whom are unique).

When you're researching a large nation with more than a billion people, you'll find a lot of people who have degrees and a lot of people who do not and a lot of people who like chewing gum and (again) a lot of people who do not.

The only thing the results should tell you is that there are a lot of people there. They say nothing about the average individual.

16son Programming is a Terrible Job

Reality kills a lot of interest. Rules, deadlines, no one cares about good design... just get it out. Only you and a few like-minded co-workers realize how neat some of the solutions are. No one else cares.

Make it a hobby. The stuff you care about at least. Apply things you discover there in your professional life and you'll stand-out and be noticed.

Most programmers don't love the job. They don't go home and think about how something can be made more efficient or scale better or fit into smaller spaces. Hell, most don't know the meaning of time and space and why those things matter. Those who do (so much so that they make a hobby out of it) are the kinds of people you want working for/with you.

Hang in there. It's not all bad.

16son Less is exponentially more (2012)

It can be a systems programming language on pretend/virtual systems where things are make-believe, but not on real, physical hardware.

16son Edward C++Hands

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

- Bjarne Stroustrup

16son Edward C++Hands

Reversing a string in Python is not obvious nor consistent:

    str[::-1]

While it is in C++:

    std::reverse(str.begin(), str.end());

And Ruby is even more obvious and consistent:

    str.reverse()

Most people who rag on C++ have never seriously used it. It's not that bad. Really, it isn't.

16son Edward C++Hands

It's still my favorite language. I do respect his thoughts, but when I have systems programming to do, I'll take C++ over anything else any day, warts and all.

16son Web development in C: Crazy?

"And when was the last time you wrote a function that returned 1 or 0? If you’re a Rubyist or a Pythonista or a server-side JavaScript devotee, you may never have done so."

That's just returning True or False (bool). Lot's of people return that from functions in all languages.

16son Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world

It's only been in the last few years that home wifi routers came with passwords by default. Before that, they defaulted to open access with no password.

16son Useless Use of Cat Award

    cat file | grep string

It's a gratuitous use of cat, it's not useless.

gratuitous - uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted

    grep string file

Is all you need.

16son Google security exec: 'Passwords are dead'

Passwords will go away about the same time Java does.

16son Postgresql 9.3 Released

Postgres is the C++ of databases. It is well thought out and designed. It seems overly complex at first until you actually use it a lot to solve hard problems, then you understand why it is the way it is and just how great all those features are.

16son Smoothies and fruit juices are a new risk to health

Diabetes too. That's a huge problem in the US. And many people who are diabetic are not excessively over-weight. Those who are not diabetic, are pre-diabetic.

"Over 25 million people in the US have diabetes, and close to 80 million are pre-diabetic." - From American Diabetes Association

IMO, this problem is way larger than the former cigarette health problem as more people consume sugary drinks and foods than smoked cigarettes.

16son How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

I find his advice to be spot on and I see proof of it every day. People still use 'Password1' as the key to their AES-256 bit encrypted file system.

You don't have to be a mathematician to attack AES-256, you just need to know humans and do some password analysis.

16son N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

If we are going to vilify encryption, then we should just stop teaching math. That's all encryption is.

16son N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

Some organizations have IT security departments that attempt to foil encryption already. They use devices to terminate SSL before it leaves their network and forge certs back to clients and basically act as a MITM for the clients making the TLS/SSL request. They do this to inspect the traffic before it leaves the network.

I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, many organizations across all industry sectors will drop/reject encrypted packets (SSL, SSH, SFTP, etc) that they cannot decrypt. And the reason they'll give is that it makes them more secure.

The concern I have (as a security technologist) is that most people who use encryption are not bad, however everyone is punished and every packet must now be inspected because a few people use encryption to do bad things. So one day soon, I'm afraid that anyone who uses encryption will be suspect simply because they do and the stronger the encryption, then the more suspect they'll be.

Will it become illegal to do encryption research or use OpenPGP unless you agree to escrow your private key or will everyone be forced to use very weak ciphers? In today's climate (encryption is evil), I see all of these things as very real possibilities.

16son N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

Normal people don't need 256-bit symmetric encryption. That's assault encryption and should only be used on the battlefield. 40-bits is enough and anything over that should be banned.

I'm only joking, but the same argument is used against other technologies that governments seek to control/dominate.

Edit: Skipjack was 80-bits I think. It was used in Clipper Phones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(cipher)

16son Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles

Be careful, this is how devs expose private ssh keys.

16son A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

Microsoft Active Directory servers (used in big business and government all over the world) uses one round of MD4 (no salt). That's a 4, not a 5.

16son School is a prison and damaging our kids

If the goal is to teach kids to shut up, sit down and get in line, then it works as expected.

16son English has been my pain for 15 years

I hope antirez never stops coding to move into management. I first came to know him during the Engine Yard Hamming Distance contest (2009). I've read and followed his work ever since.

16son Tech Companies and Government May Soon Go to War Over Surveillance

Ban crypto and then only criminals and governments would have it. Same as guns.

16son Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why

A lot of people are moving their hacking attempts under tor. They want to brute-force your ssh server, rdp, etc. but they don't want to go to prison.