Hacker News Reader

> All of our existing indexes were based on string data which had associated integer IDs in our backend

You already have a perfect hash function :).

awdaon Heartleech: Automated OpenSSL private key extraction tool using Heartbleed

Whoah, downvote for this? I thought this was factual and helpful... if you disagree, can you at least let me know what's wrong? Thanks.

For more details: Fedora 18 shipped with OpenSSL 1.0.1c on 11-Sep-2012: http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/18/Everything/x86_.... So that's 18 months of exposure for Fedora users (including me).

awdaon Heartleech: Automated OpenSSL private key extraction tool using Heartbleed

Fedora has been on OpenSSL 1.0.1 since maybe March 14, 2012 (that was when the .spec was bumped, anyway)[0]. So quite a long window for Fedora users, unfortunately.

[0]: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/openssl.git/commit/?h=f18...

awdaon Study: Majority of engineers believe they will become millionaires

Ouch. That sounds pretty horrible :(.

awdaon Bitcoin promoter Shrem indicted in NY for money laundering

I think he was selling btc for other very traceable and identity-linked forms of digital money (paypal, liberty reserve, western union, something like that). The issue was that he was operating as a money processor without following the mandatory guidelines that try to prevent laundering, etc. You can google the earlier arrest for more information on it, there are some juicy transcripts.

awdaon Study: Majority of engineers believe they will become millionaires

What part of the US do you live in that house prices are still depressed $150k since the bubble (on a house that costs presumably less than $800k)? In most cities prices have come back up, I think.

Keep in mind... you have 34 years until you're 65. That's a lot of years of investment interest, additional income, and inflation away from OP's proposed $1mil figure.

awdaon *NEVER* sanitize your inputs

https://www.google.com/search?q=input+containerization

What does the inexperienced developer learn from the new search terms?

I don't know why magically using different, non-standard words would prevent a developer from being inexperienced.

awdaon Avow-CI Is No More

I'm not sure of that, simply because many employment contracts have a term something like "any employee output of value, even in off hours, is the property of the employer." So even if it was in his spare time, he might not own the IP rights to his creation.

awdaon *NEVER* sanitize your inputs

If I am an inexperienced programmer building their first website and I refuse to even google what sanitizing inputs is, the last thing I need is some headline telling me "NEVER sanitize [my] inputs." Presumably, I won't read that either.

awdaon *NEVER* sanitize your inputs

There is no other word that isn't confusing. If you refuse to actually do some cursory research into something before implementing it, you're going to get the stupid delete-is-sanitization stuff the author describes.

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Don't do that!

awdaon IRS misses XP deadline, pays Microsoft millions for patches

3. And whatever other IRS-focused enterprise software they may be running, probably runs on the Windows platform.

Side note: Maybe this gets better in 10 years when lots of things have been written on the managed CLR? Although I don't think the challenge Wine has is running the C++ programs, but implementing all of the stubbed out APIs correctly... the same challenge exists with a C# interface.

awdaon Akamai release source to their custom secure_malloc for OpenSSL

> If not, why doesn't OpenSSL use an existing secure malloc library?

Any extra library dependency makes OpenSSL less portable. It doubles the work needed to get it running on your new embedded system. shrug It may also increase the code size and attack surface (although probably a good trade-off).

I don't disagree that it sounds like a good idea :).

awdaon Google Code Jam – Contest scoreboard

This is just quals...

awdaon Can You Buy A License to Speed?

It's like, if you can avoid crashing through sufficient awareness and caution, why not save the money and avoid insurance? There's a risk <-> cost trade-off here, and on one side is higher risk lower cost and on the other side is lower risk higher cost.

awdaon Massachusetts Governor Announces Plan to Abolish Noncompetes

I work for EMC. Do we know if this will retroactively apply to existing contracts?

awdaon Tarsnap: No heartbleed here

JeffR sounded pretty busy with preparing those betas and RCs, iirc. ;)

awdaon Tarsnap: No heartbleed here

I've been hearing about it from some FreeBSDers for months before that, so I can never remember the actual release date. But I would believe you on January :).

awdaon Tarsnap: No heartbleed here

It isn't that much older... stable/9 was the latest until 10 came out within the last year. The release cycle is closer to, say, Debian, than, say, Fedora.

awdaon TLS/SSL implementation in Haskell

whoosh!

awdaon OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

Historically, the alternatives are incomplete, solve only part of the problem, or are even worse (GnuTLS?).

awdaon Navy tests rail gun

I imagine there's still a tremendous amount of unstable vibration being introduced by sudden acceleration to mach 7. There's just lots of force involved in these things.

awdaon IE6 is dead

Xeon E3 1240 v3 (Haswell) ;-).

awdaon IE6 is dead

I got "100%" too, but there's multiple criteria for passing:

   - 100%
   - Animation is smooth, no stuttering
   - The final rendering matches the provided image

awdaon IE6 is dead

Huh, I just went to the acid3 test in Firefox 28 and it failed. (Animation wasn't smooth, final rendering did not match expected image at all.) Is this surprising? I thought acid3 was a fairly old test.

awdaon Navy tests rail gun

Have they fixed the problem where the gun destroys itself after three shots? (Edit: downvoters: this is a serious question. This is a (historical?) known problem with railguns.[0])

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Considerations

awdaon U.S. requires new cars to have backup cameras

Back-up deaths constitute 210 deaths per year, of 34k auto deaths anually (2012)?

And this technology is only estimated to prevent 33% of them (60-70)?

I guess every little 0.2% safety improvement is good if it's free... but I'm not sure this is the most cost effective way to increase car safety.

(Roll cages; higher standards for airbags and various types of collision for occupants; crumple zones for pedestrians; self-driving cars (if you're going to go full-sensor anyway, why involve a human at all).)

awdaon As Amazon Mimics Google’s Price Drop, Cloud Computing Grows Up

The article suggests that people (who?) believed AWS was a low-margin business. Why would anyone think that? (And who?)

awdaon The SAS vs. R Debate

The only similarity I can think of is that everything is a table :).

awdaon The SAS vs. R Debate

The way in which SAS is like Excel is that everything is a table.

SAS is not very accessible, especially to non-coders.

awdaon `three = 1` in the linux sourcecode

This is actually contrary to Linux kernel "good style". Functions should be short and understandable. Comments should be on the top of the function, describing what the function is for. Comments describing variables in functions are discouraged.