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awda

467 karma · joined January 8, 2012

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awda··on The New TextSecure: Privacy Beyond SMS
Is it? I just updated to Cyanogen 10.2.1 and TextSecure is definitely a different app from Messaging. Or is this an 11.x feature?

Edit: Oh, I see. Added as a silent feature in 10.2 messaging app. There is no visible indication that secure communication is happening (or possible). Ok. Better than nothing, and a good default.

awda··on People in your organization that grow legacy code
Ok, problem number one: Without looking at the code, what day is number 3?
awda··on EU has secret plan for police to 'remote stop' cars
Cops already have that power, yes. But random assholes on the internet didn't have that power, until now. That's the problem with this sort of bound-to-be-insecure remote shut-off technology (trolls or criminal abuse).
awda··on Darwin's Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript
Ah, and here I thought the title was linkbait for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Children .
awda··on Mozilla will put ads directly into Firefox
Linux distros will not ship ads that kick money to individual components. The only way this will land in e.g. Fedora is if Firefox pulls the ad-laden page from Mozillas servers during startup. And I don't see them being too happy with even that.
awda··on Sheriff Fires Cop Who Threatened to Arrest Me for Taking Photos of Cops
Yes, they did:

"""Saulet has long history of misconduct, with approximately 120 allegations against him and 21 cases of sustained misconduct (more than any other officer in the department). The sheriff's letter says that Saulet repeatedly was told to improve interactions with the public, and provided with remarkable investments of coaching and counseling. Saulet underwent three performance-improvement plans, two training sessions, and two multi-visit sessions with a social psychologist, coaching sessions with supervisors, and 80 hours of time off without pay."""

awda··on Optimising Haskell for a tight inner loop
By break0, it looks like we're just writing Haskell-ified C. (Lots of ugly, similar safety guarantees.)
awda··on JPMorgan Pays for Shorting Madoff Without Telling Anyone
Tax deductible doesn't mean they save $7 bn.
awda··on Greatest: C unit testing library in one file
More sophisticated C unit testing libraries (libcheck, for example) use nice compiler features beyond ANSI C, like linker sets, in order to avoid error-prone duplicating like you see in these examples.

While that may not work in some environments that don't support these extensions, I'm having trouble imagining ones that support C stdio but do not support linker sets.

awda··on Hammerspace: Persistent, Concurrent, Off-heap Storage
Maybe just add a shared-memory front-end to memcache?
awda··on Hammerspace: Persistent, Concurrent, Off-heap Storage
Durable shared memory -- like, a (loocal) database?! I'm kind of amazed at the degree of wheel-reinventing going on here.
awda··on Software engineers tell Glassdoor that Walmart pays more than Facebook
Yep. Among the US population as a whole, lifetime illicit drug use is something like 50%. So I wouldn't be too surprised if it was that high among SV engineers.
awda··on Software engineers tell Glassdoor that Walmart pays more than Facebook
Independent of state (medical or otherwise) marijuana laws, employers still drug test (even in WA, where personal pot use is legal, for example). Pot users aren't a protected class for discrimination purposes, afaik. I agree that it seems silly.

Things are a bit different in the software world, where employers are moving away from drug testing because they need all the talent they can get. It turns out some potheads are actually pretty productive members of society if you give them a chance.

awda··on Fix a FirefoxOS bug, get a free APC
Hurray, for $300 in labor you get a free $60 computer!
awda··on Gnome 3.10 Release Notes
"New in GNOME 3.10: Select to copy is disabled (but we let you keep middle-click to paste)"

Thanks, GNOME3.

awda··on Revealed: Qatar's World Cup 'slaves'
Yeah, it's not illegal, just totally unsafe due to vigilante mobs enforcing perceived societal values. TOTALLY different. </sarcasm>

Relative to each other, maybe it's better for gays in Russia than Qatar. But they're both pretty fucking awful compared to the rest of the world.

awda··on The Trie: A Neglected Data Structure
Tries have hardly been neglected. "Path-compressed" tries were very recently added to FreeBSD[0] for use in the vm subsystem.

[0]: http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/sys/pctrie.h

awda··on FreeBSD Is No Longer Building GCC By Default
This. As a corporate user of FreeBSD (with conservative lawyers), we're stuck with the last GPLv2 GCC release -- 4.2.2, which is now over 5 years old.

Believe me, recent GCC (4.7, 4.8) is worlds better than 4.2. We pine for something better.

awda··on Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend
Sure -- but if you're happy being an employee, not a founder, the $$$ is great. </big_corp_cog>
awda··on Snow HN: Choosing a name for your project is hard. This makes it easier.
Any pair of colors except (red, green).
awda··on Which is better? Performing calculations in sql or in your application?
We push data over 10Gbit - 40Gbit ports, but the point still stands.
awda··on The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
Yeah, but what does that mean, for someone who has a reasonable grasp of crypto, math, software engineering?

For example: "Unlocking encryption." We've heard that they haven't actually broken (some?) crypto primitives (caveat: with large enough key sizes). What attack have they actually succeeded in?

The backdooring of proprietary products is interesting, if not surprising. It's good to see it come to light. You may not be able to trust OSS without auditing it, but at least you can audit it.

"Undermine the fabric of the internet" is pretty vague.

It sounds like there isn't actually a lot of detail out there yet -- I look forward to learning more.

awda··on The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
How exactly is the NSA cheating and breaking internet crypto? Can someone clarify? Edit: Downvoted? Is it a bad question?
awda··on Data Broker Lets You See Their Dossier About You Starting Today
Well, I'm happy they're totally wrong about me. Married ?! Two children ?! German ?! At least they got Male right...
awda··on Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent
You need less cars to serve the needs of the currently-in-motion population than for everyone to own their own car. The idea is, a smaller percentage of cars are parked at any given time, and can meet demand with fewer cars. Fewer cars, less parking required.
awda··on Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent
Easy answer? Low population density, lots of space, relative to Europe (totally unfamiliar with Beijing). UW (U district) is a bit cheaper than capital hill (when I lived in U district, 1 parking spot came w/ rent, an additional spot was $50/mo).
awda··on Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent
Maybe First Hill is special, but parking in Seattle proper and Capitol Hill (both near First Hill) is extremely crowded and finding a spot can be hard. The mythical building plot described in the article sounds wonderful relative to my experience:

"Overnight, when your tenants’ cars will most likely be at home, the office buildings’ garages are usually empty. And, of course, there are hundreds of curb spaces within six blocks of your building, though neighbors’ vehement territoriality about “their” spaces would make it impolitic to mention those in an appeal to the city for a parking waiver. Odds are that your tenants could secure whatever parking they wanted for much less than $250 a month per spot."

The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one of these subterranean garages.

Speaking of garages, any reason you can't build the garage on levels 1-2 and put apartments on 3-5?

awda··on Linus: bool is dangerous in C if you don't understand it
This should be okay, though:

   char *p1 = 0;
   int pv = (intptr_t)p1;
   char *p2 = (char *)pv;
I.e. NULL must round-trip through intptr_t.
awda··on Memories of positive associations get written onto DNA
What makes you think this is pushed by the government? I'm envisioning opt-in.
awda··on Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why
The only event you know of. I find the botnet idea much more probable, given the increased usage across many countries.
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