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bowyakka

1,405 karma · joined May 18, 2009

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bowyakka··on Who employs your doctor? Increasingly, a private equity firm
Be a shame if someone looked up this on Google and found that it's not as outsized as some think

https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm

bowyakka··on Rust for Linux redux
Hmmm while I agree with you, doesn't the fact qualsys went looking out eyes on it? We sure that a seq_lock bug isn't present in say OSX, QNX, Windows?
bowyakka··on Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software
Is it not a bit of a paradox that said embedded platforms matter enormously right up to, but not including the point of having toolchains ported to them and maintained? And yes while gcc can be built to produce binaries for an alpha it's not producing any bugs right?
bowyakka··on I’m deaf, and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call
I am not deaf and I love captions and subtitles.

I will often watch movies with them one, it might be that I grew up with them as my father is deaf; but I find they give me more information than speech alone.

bowyakka··on A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid
true that.

I guess my counter would be:

* It was solved at a greater expense of human life, its easy to say "those people would have died" but that is harder to prove ethically. Could the excess deaths have lived on _longer than a flu season_?

* Is there a good argument that it is in fact over in Sweden?

* Are there other variables that might have made Covid-19 not so bad in Sweden?

If I was to take more direct counters to the article:

> I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway.

Maybe, but that could also be a case of thinking that the death rate is a fairly simple linear model, which would fly in the face of the various epidemiological models that we use (not just for covid but since the 1920s)

> No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated.

Is Covid-19 completely new? By this reasoning it would as stated be more infectious due to a lack of known immunity. With this line of reasoning why wouldn't a _different_ cornovirus also give a more uniform immunity? Why would a novel Cornovirus strain have a greater impact over a novel Influenza strain?

I could go one but I feel like I am sniping.

Personally I dont think the world wide response has been great, I do think we have overreacted but I also would argue that its not just another influenza and should be ignored as such.

bowyakka··on A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid
Counter arguments:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v...

https://covid19-projections.com/denmark vs https://covid19-projections.com/sweden

Its also possible Sweden just got lucky with the prevalent strain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233866v1....

I would love it if Sweden was right and tackled this in a way that does look like a seasonal flu, but I think the science is still out on that. It does seem the science points mildly towards it being quite as deadly as initially thought, but I would not the Swedish death rate a total win.

<snark> Forget all that Sweden is the best approach, we should copy it in America especially the very solid social health care system :) </snark>

bowyakka··on Certificate Transparency Log Compromised via Salt Vulnerability
> Is your reasonably small bank known for its reliability and fault tolerance? The main reason banks don't go offline is because the core critical infrastructure is running on 50 year old mainframes that no one is allowed to touch because all of the greybeards with actual talent who made them are pushing up daisies.

> Nowhere did I say you should be on one incredibly large server, nor that you should have a single point of failure. That wouldn't be simple, either, because it would fail to support the prime directive, or would require a great deal of gymnastics to. It's about balance. You don't need thousands of servers to make a reliable system.

Heh those things go offline every night for 2 hour maintenance.

Also fun when those nice single points of failure crash (they do)

Source: work at a shop trying to _get out of_ greybeard mainframe to get more reliablity

bowyakka··on Oracle VP: Data would be safer if most OSS distributed databases didn't exist
Scott/tiger
bowyakka··on A visual proof that neural nets can approximate any function
http://cs.nju.edu.cn/lwj/L2H.html
bowyakka··on The Essence of Datalog (2018)
On the continum of relational algebra to logic programming catalog is somewhere in the middle.

It is better at handling recursive queries, and logical inference than SQL. On the flip side SQL can be better at more set style operations (for instance windowing functions are painful in datalog).

It is different tooling, essentially it comes down to do you want to extract answers from your data with varying relational algebra but holding the logic the same (SQL), or keeping the relational algebra the same but varying the logic (datalog).

bowyakka··on The relative performance of C and Rust
cargo --release doe not compile at -O3 either it's at -O2
bowyakka··on YubiKey 5 Series with New NFC and FIDO2 Passwordless Features
On Android there is this https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store

Works great

bowyakka··on Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration
https://securityzap.com/pwn2own-2017-chrome-remains-winner-b...

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224...

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/p...

I am using 2017 because 2018 is not over yet

bowyakka··on x86 finds its way into the iPhone
I am, I am not faulting the original author just pointing out you can get disassemblers to come up with x86.

From the comment right under the picture I took

> yeah, pretty typical function prolog, what's the question ?

Except we know it is not.

I am more saying to people be careful pushing any old binary blob through capstone without considering what it might produce, I get this at $DAYJOB where people disassemble VAX from things that are just data.

bowyakka··on x86 finds its way into the iPhone
So while I am sure the author checked this, it bears mentioning that disassembling CISC is more of a black art than RISC. You can feed any binary file into a disassembler and get x86 code out, even if that code is invalid.

For example here is a "program" except it's really a meme gif off my phone. https://imgur.com/gallery/hoDKeC9

bowyakka··on Trump administration cracks down on H-1B visa abuse
> Most people can get a Green Card within a year (even with moderate skills) and citizenship at 5 years without language test.

You are hilariously misinformed. I am 3.5 years and waiting on an EB2 and I am British, I know Caltech professors who took 3 years to get on EB1.

Part of the issue isn't entirely the government but also the cottage industry of legal firms. These firms (at least in my experience) can take _longer_ than some of the government steps.

bowyakka··on Best practices for user account, authorization and password management
It was in older versions from 2016

[Out of band verification] using SMS is deprecated, and will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance

bowyakka··on Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens
Just leave this here http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5497778
bowyakka··on Barely Half of 30-Year-Olds in the U.S. Earn More Than Their Parents Did at 30
You are assuming you cannot be automated away, why?
bowyakka··on 'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience
In black mirror its a can of compliance
bowyakka··on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?
You pay blacklotus a big pile of money and giggle at attackers.

http://www.level3.com/~/media/files/brochures/en_secur_br_dd...

bowyakka··on OLEOutlook: Bypass Almost Every Corporate Security Control with a GUI
Good god that trick still works. I used to use this on windows 3.11 and winword.exe 2.0 in high school. We had RM nimbus computers (UK horrible educational computer manufacturer) that were locked down and didn't want to run arbitrary things.

I found this trick, we used to play doom and rise of the triad with this and some other glue. I am surprised this trick still works so well for foxing security checkers

bowyakka··on Infrastructure Pioneer Predicts Datacenter Days Are Numbered
https://www.stickermule.com/marketplace/3442-there-is-no-clo...
bowyakka··on MITIE: MIT Information Extraction
Last time we did a runtime performance benchmark

http://gbowyer.freeshell.org/ner-perf.png

bowyakka··on Removal of Unsafe in Java 9 – A disaster in the making
Ok moving past the rhetoric of don't use internal classes, there is a value to sun.misc.Unsafe. It has been well known by Oracle for some time that it has to go away right.

Realise that those of us that do use it, are fully aware that it is a hack, and that we should be doing cleaner things. However know that those cleaner things _dont exist_; and that you, Dear application developer might not quite realise some of the shadow puppetry in making your favourite library work, please lay off the bile.

As others have said, this blog post stops short, the full quote is part of a very long and ongoing process to rid ourselves of Unsafe, replacing its majors usages with new API's.

This is a process Oracle started last year after the previous sun.reflect.Reflection.getCalleeClass mess. Yes, it no one should have been using an internal class. This method did not go away; it was made only available to the JVM internals, locked out from end users. The upshot of this was that, with no sane alternative, suddenly logging became between 2x and 100x more expensive where class names become involved. The JDK team somewhat back peddled on this change, and we are stuck here in a strange limbo land.

Was it right of Oracle to do this? Absolutely, everyone who goes down the internal package route is fully aware that these are open-state secrets, sure we all know them, but we should not be talking about them. Support for these damn things requires version to version checking, hideous reflection hacks and being prepared to read a lot of JVM source code for when bugs occur.

In light of all of this, and being the general level of awesome the JDK folks are they started a very direct community outreach to remove safely Unsafe. Last year they publicly asked people on the mailing list, and privately via email to do a survey (http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2014-Ja...) on usages of Unsafe. I know this because I got an email from Paul Sandoz asking me to comment on Unsafe abusages. Out of previous thinking from the JDK folks, as well as from the aforementioned survey, we have a bunch of JEP's for improving things regarding Unsafe.

Where things have gone slightly sideways is that we have, currently no unified working group to deal with these changes. What this document is, is a proposal to make a working group, focused on getting the right changes into the JVM. In the same ways as Project Jigsaw is for modularising the JVM (and is indirectly responsible for removing Unsafe), or the MLVM project handled making the VM better support other languages.

Unsafe is dead, long live Unsafe! I fully expect that we will achieve the right changes in during Java 9 to allow those of us that need to break the rules, to do it in a supported fashion. I am _looking_ forward to the day when I can do setMemory or getAndSetInt via a supported API, and not one where I have to know the words Unsafe.theUnsafe. The above is a storm in a teacup, its open-source democracy at work.

bowyakka··on Why has R, despite quirks, been so successful?
Not to poke holes in this but is this actually that hard ?

    import pandas as pd
    from sklearn.linear import SVC

    df = pd.read_csv('/home/me/programming/data.csv')
    y = df['label']
    X = df.drop('label', axis=1)

    clf = SVC()
    clf.fit(X, y)
... Most of the things have a similar API, except for when I veer off into say deep-learning land.

This is not to say that R is a bad language, or that R does not have equally nice API's for this stuff; but I feel that in your case its a familiarity of language thing.

bowyakka··on Rent-a-Foreigner in China
This reminds me of this http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/
bowyakka··on Rent-a-Foreigner in China
this reminds me of http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/
bowyakka··on Hypothesis 1.0: A property-based testing library for Python
Gin is fine, prehaps meet at a pycon one day :P
bowyakka··on Hypothesis 1.0: A property-based testing library for Python
This library is awesome, I am a massive fan of randomized and quick-check style testing. This type of testing has for me found so many bugs its surreal.

I love the fact that hypothesis is a proper quickcheck and not just the fuzzing part, and that the author has a crazy stack-based-vm-language-testing thing project that might be useful.

I have been using this library with py.test for 6 months now and its been a godsend.

If I ever meet the author I would buy him beers.

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