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_cairn

76 karma · joined December 4, 2015

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_cairn··on Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
I imagine something akin to a bat signal that alerts Aphyr to these types of posts. Looking forward to the Jepsen write-up.
_cairn··on New York could prohibit chatbot medical, legal, engineering advice
It’s not illegal to provide advice of this nature without a license. It’s illegal to charge for services where you are advertising expertise in these areas without a license. Chatbots are information tools, like search engines, they should not be held to this standard imho.
_cairn··on Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation
I might be missing the point but isn’t this what we use mypy et al for today?
_cairn··on 1MB Club
I think the reason why blog posts are written in this hyperbolic format is because it catches people’s attention, or “click bait”, if you will. If it were toned down in the way you suggested (which I agree with in principle), it might lose more readers before they get to the substance. Just hypothesizing here btw.
_cairn··on CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
I believe they meant PC as in PC (Windows) vs Mac. I've encountered a lot of people who use PC <-> Windows Machine interchangeably.
_cairn··on MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]
Getting:

This video file cannot be played. (Error Code: 224003)

On all the videos, tried Safari and Chrome.

_cairn··on Riot police called after U of Dayton students take to streets following closure
Yes, but clickbait.
_cairn··on Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections (2017)
I had my Vitamin D levels tested last year, was enlightening. For those interested it's a pretty painless (small blood sample) and inexpensive test.
_cairn··on DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
This is a neat idea but I also have no idea if theoretically feasible or not.
_cairn··on No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"
_cairn··on How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods (2015) [pdf]
Thank you! I will check this out.
_cairn··on How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods (2015) [pdf]
Does anyone have resources that talk about writing a TLA+ model for an existing software system as opposed to designing a new system using TLA+ as the design reference?
_cairn··on Zuckerberg doubles down on Facebook political ads policy after Twitter ban
Agree wholeheartedly with how you posed the question, I would like to expand:

Should Adult (xxx) sites be held accountable for ads for male enlargement pills/snake oils? I personally don't think so. Is the answer to this problem to teach our population that blindly accepting what you read is safe (you can trust information posted on social media/public internet sites as fact) OR do we instead teach our citizens to filter information analytically and do research the way you are taught to in university for example?

Personally I think the former option is an intractable problem. Why try to make it safe for your population NOT to have to think instead of just teaching them how to think critically?

_cairn··on Anxious tech workers are going to therapy
Thanks for this.
_cairn··on Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)
Unrelated to op, never seen this link before, super cool thanks for sharing.
_cairn··on One player spent 10 years exploring every corner of Eve Online
Disclaimer: I agree with you mostly. I think your comment is an almost complete argument against playing video games. I do think it's a little incomplete to say that things inside a game can't translate to real world value. i.e. people sell accounts/items/characters for fiat currency with some regularity. Is that net-profitable or not? Maybe. Is it possible that time investment could have been spent elsewhere? Yes. And probably for better ROI. But in terms of ways that exist in this world for people to waste time/money/resources. Games seem like a very mild offender. Overall your comment makes a lot of sense though. Thanks for taking the time to write a well-thought out response to OP. Have a nice day!
_cairn··on Streaming Cassandra at WePay
Not the author of the relevant post but assuming he's tailing off of the first response I can only surmise they meant that in their case Kafka was unnecessary/a bad choice due to the restraints posed (<5 minute delay, streaming input, etc). Agree that without context it's an incomplete comment that does come off as dismissive, ("junior dev") seems to be meant as belittling/insulting.
_cairn··on Teller – API for your bank account
Sorry for the newb question but a quick google didn't yield the results I was looking for. What is the attack vector here that "screen scraping" would exploit?
_cairn··on Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences
Coding for programmers [nerds] is fun, we should do it all the time [nights and weekends] and magically improve/learn new tech by osmosis. /s

I genuinely think this is how many people outside dev think.

_cairn··on Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study
This is fantastic advice and very well written to boot. I think you could expand on this thought in a blog post or short story. I know I'd read it.
_cairn··on Amazon Echo Show
If you assume a villain/nefarious actor is in play, then people have been doing this with mobile phones/tablets/computers/smart TVs for a long time - why do we make such a big distinction between those devices and this one. They're the same thing.
_cairn··on Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person
Not saying that what you are implying is wrong, but empirically speaking working hard/relative merit do not correlate to proportionate monetary rewards in our current system. The idea of a pure meritocracy is an interesting one, I wonder what some of the outcomes would be.
_cairn··on Hackers Stole My Website
I agree, I think a manager with randomly generated (and long) passwords is the way to go in terms of security + ease of use sweet spot. edit: in addition to 2FA/yubikey type measures.
_cairn··on Hackers Stole My Website
Well, I am not very well informed on this topic, however, I tend to believe that the math checks out in the "correct horse" principle. This is a vast oversimplification, but basically longer passwords are better - the brute force complexity of additional length is in the exponent, the character diversity (special chars/numbers/upper+lower case) is in the base. Therefore, make your passwords as long (and randomly chosen - i.e. selection method should not be easy to guess!) as you possibly can.
_cairn··on Hackers Stole My Website
Cool thanks for the link! Were you meaning to say that you consider the "correct horse" password selection principles bad advice? Or that the advice given by the author of the article is bad advice?
_cairn··on Hackers Stole My Website
Her password advice is literally the opposite of the classic https://xkcd.com/936/.
_cairn··on An Apology for Roger Ebert (2011)
RE: 'games are not art because they give you choices'

This is a really unfortunate argument to make in my opinion, it's pretty misleading and essentially an unfalsifiable claim. Music, film, poetry, literature - also all give you 'choices' in various forms.

I personally look at it this way - one thing about 'art' that sticks out to me is the fact that the portion of it (across all mediums) that I find the most compelling is the section that makes no presuppositions about deeming itself 'art' or 'great art'. As the audience I only come to the realization that something is 'art' once I've experienced it for myself. Music, film, literature and video games (also not an exhaustive list of mediums) alike can all have this effect in my experience.

_cairn··on Why is this job not handled by a machine yet?
Some good points you bring up.

This is not a response to your entire post, just a small one to "where we don't want a rigid machine-like process" - I think this is something that machines are perfectly capable of solving. We are not arguing about whether or not, in the ticket printer case, the machine should or should not print a ticket outside it's rigid specified rules (late by 1 minute etc). In fact I think that most of us would agree that as a matter of principle such grace-periods are a fundamental lubricant of a comfortable society. We just have (historically) had to plead our cases and rely on the grace of other humans to grant such meager exceptions to rigid rules. We are just arguing at this point about what the numbers for such grace periods should be, machines can easily implement them once we find a happy medium. My $0.02 anyway.

_cairn··on GDB Debugging Full Example: Ncurses
I'd like to add, as someone who is a novice programmer and trying to get more and more immersed in this world - it's posts like these that give you a small peek into thinking/being a programmer as opposed to doing programming as a job/profession/etc. Part of what makes programming and computers scary to beginners, speaking from my experience, is the notion that there is an infinite amount of complexity hiding just behind your IDE (things far beyond your grasp/ability to comprehend - i.e. You'll never know really how your program goes from the pretty syntax highlighted code in the IntelliJ window to x y or z app, or worse as in this case, when something goes wrong god forbid something with a sinister sounding name like 'segmentation fault'). Breaking that barrier down through the use of seemingly simple yet extremely powerful tools (Emacs, gdb, bash, etc) really helps, at least for me, feel less raw intimidation and self-loathing and more and more wonderment and inspiration to continue learning and hacking away.
_cairn··on GDB Debugging Full Example: Ncurses
There's a typo under heading 7.

...And thanks for the awesome write-up, makes something intimidating for a beginner like myself (gdb) seem somehow less so. Feeling inspired.

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