aknoob

A bit off track but here in India I see, all sorts of negligence shown by delivery guys of almost all delivery companies - Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats, etc. Even cab drivers of Ola, Uber are reckless. It is high time these companies start taking accountability.

Conceptually, Pointer is a higher and a more well defined, level of abstraction than a raw integer.In much the same way as an Iterator is a higher and more well defined level of abstraction than a raw pointer.

The fact that an Iterator, a pointer and an integer all tend to be different ways of looking at same integer value is more or less an implementation detail.

I think the question should be why is assignment operator represented using "=" ?

A null-terminated representation is as close to a fundamental datatype for a string as possible. It is same in spirit as other fundamental data types in C like array. People have built abstractions over these fundamental datatypes over the years.

Could it be some extreme form of muscle-memory ?

Your assumption is right. Once the shared library gets loaded in the process address space. You can also set a breakpoint on module load.

Depends on how you define fault here. Is it mere logical correctness of code or any error that might occur when code executes. If we follow former definition of fault then , they both are similar in being "fault-proof". If we follow later definition then execution environment of the program comes into play and it depends on a lot of variables and their complex interplay, that it becomes much harder to provide any formal guarantees of fault tolerance.

However there are execution environments, read RTOS that try to be fault tolerant. Also various virtual machines like JVM,CLR try to provide fault tolerance to varying degrees.

Do you have data supporting your claim. I know a lot of people who are really good and continue to work in India. Infact I have also seen a lot of good people coming back to India (since last 2 - 3 years). So things are gradually improving for good.

The very first thing that you need to do is to pick a software stack, ideally opensource and then learn how that software-stack works bottom up. Learning how a linux application works might be a good starting point if you are totally new.

There are multiple layers involved here and really understanding each one would take time.

Next would come understanding browsers, browser although it is an app, it is a world in itself. How an http request flows through a browser, how an http response is rendered, what are various layers involved. TCP/IP stack to physical layer, wifi/usb. It is extremely vast and very interesting.

And once you have gained enough experience , you will be able to clearly see the similarities and differences between various software stacks, both bottom-up and top-down, right from hardware level to your application's code and vice versa. And then reasoning about security of the stack at various layers would become straightforward.

In terms of conferences, I find Blackhat(http://www.blackhat.com/) Conference is a very good source of keeping oneself up to date with world of security( including applying Data Science to Security)

Isn't this scary ?