julie1

Bright article for once.

But, such a shame people don't understand what survival to the fittest means.

Bombers/planes are expensive. Some people think that if you are rich then having expensive toys is good. Less people are able to buy them so you should win the wars against almost all poor countries.

Right, it is a basic asymmetric situation. Survival to the fittest, is about using your advantage.

Well, how expensive is it in a poor country to build and destroy an expensive plane?

Stealth plane are stealth. They tend to absorb waves. Thus if you have a distributed grid of electromagnetic emitters you probably have a very cheap radar very efficient for detecting stealth plane. Once you have a vector, shooting a plane that has a given cone of future is quite trivial.

Well, that is called a mobile network. I am no genius, but I see a potential for reverting the assymetry. Ok, maybe I am wrong. But, war is assymetric. If you can invest 1% of the sum in military expense compared to your ennemy to defeat him, then you win in much more cases.

The fighter vs missile is known since they droped the MACH 4 plane studies (dassault).

The point about war is we can't prepare for it because we never know how it will look like.

My stupid opinion is: it is better to avoid war, and invest the saved money in education of fine citizens that will be smart in face of a new situation called war so that we may survive.

But one can also build very expensive planes... that can be defeated with very small cheap education.

Oh! rediscovering basic science: allergies are violent reactions to toxins!

My physic teachers used to say science is not about why but about how.

Why is religion, how is science.

I checked; I remembered the wrong analogy: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pick-and-shovel-play.asp

I am talking of a pick and shovel scheme. I should be ashamed, but I am not :) It is still the rigt idea and something already heard of.

It is called a gold rush 2.0.

The second .com bubble is about making tools for startup to be efficient and then advertise how much these business models are successful to attract more startup to make tools for startups.

The same way during gold rush, the hardware reseller made the most money and were sending ads abouts the gold rush everywhere.

This time, there is just no gold.

12 years ago miod and marc talking of openBSD http://www.libroscope.org/OpenBSD-ne-desarme-pas (fr)

or miod taking is sherlock holmes hat to solve a GCC bug http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/10/02/openbsd_gcc.html

Yes I am a fanboy of miod, and I am not even ashamed.

Most of the time spent is in debugging/maintaining.

Terrible code base says that the value per customers is decresaing while customers increases because your costs (of software QA) are eating your margins.

Ugly codebase that does not scale with increasing efficiency for instance.

Remember low OPEXes always beat KPEX (investment)

People focus on features in software as the only value, I think it is the recuring costs per feature that should be the value.

For instance storing digitalized book is plain stupid. The first book printed is still there because paper/ink are cost efficient in terms of recurring costs for their value of keeping information whereas servers/software ... will doom data to an end because of reccuring costs that don't scale.

That is the point.

You should assess critically why you can't remember.

It means either you lack knowledge in underlying abstractions OR the map is wrong.

So, you have to orthogonal thinking to do:

- reinforce your capacitive memory by echoing to other concepts (analogy); - or not remembering inconsistent technologies.

I love the map idea: when learning a new technology try to see it as a map.

Follow blindly the analogy. If it is easy to remember and it works it is good technology.

Else, it may mean the technology is shitty or you lack other intermediates abstractions.

Knowing if it is you or the frameworks that sucks is daily challenge, but I can give you an hint: most modern techs are neither modern nor technology; most of them are pure marketing hype of broken tools.

After you had to learn to use spice, matlab, VHDL, all the weired stuff of physics (Quantum mechanics, physical stats, relativity...), english and german ... then computer new technologies are laughably neither complex nor disrupting.

Most of the new techs are fraud like angular; like in science a new tech should be something that simplifies the world with a simplified view : a map.

A map should always be simpler than the stuff you want to describe. Angular for instance is kind of the string theory of JS development; formalism is complex, it makes a lockin for incompetent devs but it brings nothing new.

But still, I can do angular fairly well, because I like to rant, and it is funnier to rub your despise into people's face when you outsmart them.

Computer language when you had to learn thousands of words to be understood and complex grammars for foreign languages are freaking easy; python is around 50 core words. Perl 300 ...

Most of what computer science are proud of is scam. No critical thinking and no building up of intuition makes people looks like headless chicken yelling «new tech, new tech» and bumping into each other.

Me on the other hand, I can guess where the flow of circuitry will bring the data into memory, if their will be localisation if the L1, L2 cache will be used. I can feel the unstability of the sequencer with page fault or OOP missing.

Why?

Because computer is still a dumb automata that is part of my formation; I learnt how to build microchips.

But electronics also learns you how to face complexity.

You don't see the world bottom up or top down. You are like a go player. You embrace the world's complexity by building up 2 pictures of complexity one for the bottom the other for the top and you try to make them converge in the middle.

high level abstractions like CSS and files (yes a file that has the open/read/write/seek/tell/close/ioctl is an abstraction, it does not exists on the silicium level) requires to be careful. But still they are never new. They are built up on other layers of abstraction (geometry for CSS)

Some abstractions are insanely more complex than the world they describe (CSS). Happily for me I learnt Tk/Tcl that gave the packing geometry understanding (the so called boxing model).

Angular is shit, but I learnt xmlhttppartialrequest a long time ago, so I know how to circumvent this horror.

I can quote a lot of example where focusing on the basics on the core of knowledge (what does the GIL do, how to bind on a library with python, who does the PCI bus works) finally makes you outsmart the competition of the stupid devs throwing themselves in new technology in the hope they can cut corners.

There is no lazyness possible. Computer programming requires a lot of knowledge, rather focus on learning the basics : - what is an OS (especially POSIX); - network programming; - algorithm; - CPU architecture; - a tinge of ASM; - bus specification; - memory allocation; - physics (only physicists understand why distributed MUST not use timestamps or any global clock and why «acausal» events might occures); - math: linear algebrae, proba and especially geometry (yep even for CSS); - theory of measure; - signal processing and the theory of dectection of errors

When you have the basics, no frameworks or new technology are either intimidating or out of grasp.

Most of the so called new techs are fraud.

If a map is not simpler and as accurate as the world it tries to describe, then throw it away. That's how I deal with new techs; by discarding most of them.

It is a FUD. Thesis : you may think you have nothing to hide, but because of sociogramms and retroactive laws you do. Because everybody is related to everybody, you are being watched. Thus don't move, don't speak, just hide.

A programm is made of code and setup/tweaking.

If you make a program for interconnecting element together (by definition a complex system) it can yield chaotic behaviour. What will be important will not be your code for doing so, but your setup.

You may not want to spread your specific setup, but you can release good brick of your code that may benefit from externalities (the more it has adoption, the more it enforces your position on the market). (virtuous cicle)

You can also release on purpose shitty free softwares blocking the devs from easily be able to use their platform if there are not «pro» of your complex solution... like systemd (vicious circle, the more it is adopted, the more you block competitors)

This attitude is gross: open source contributors are not your bitches.

And in open source, if you spot a problem: fix it by contributing.

Shaming someone publicly (isn't it bullying?) that contributes a lot for «being unnice» on his spare time helping people is like shaming a construction worker for being sweaty.

Instead of whining he should take part of the load. Especially if he ares about the community.

You don't solve the inflexion problem. You would need something where the lemmization tokenization of the sentence is easily accessible to a grammar engine. Something horrible like: <div ><lemm="personnal pronoun">I</lemm> <lemm=verb>have</lemm>< <case=accusative quant=3><lemm=noun quantifier /><lemm=....</div>

weired in my old greek lessons it was already said to be the motto of Athen. http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/3824

Maybe Zappata went to school and studied the story of Athen?

It is called cargo cult computing.

People understand the security importance, they hear the words, and instead of applying them, they disguise as monkeys and are repeating the words ad nauseum while throwing bananas at people's faces expecting security to happen.

It is also happening in OS, sysadmins, science...

You are not the only one to experience this.

Stay light hearted :) anyway, you are closer to the retirement they are, thus you will have less mess to clean.

And VHDL.

FSM are anolgous to cellular automata, and since it is non linear algebrae, it is impossible to predict a finite sequence. FSM do indeed have most of the time regular basin of attraction with finite sequences, but there are chaotic evolutions that may results in finite (and longer than usual) sequences and infinite sequences without repetitions (given an infinite playground or CBP does the job).

And we put a lot of this chaotic systems in our software design.

The definition of a complex system is: a lot of simple system interacting with one an another. The physics and math of this typology of problem concluded that it is pretty much a non linear, non euclidean problem.

So far, what we know about these beasts is they are non predictible, BUT they are robusts around their equilibrum if not pertubated too much.

The stregnth of the beast is the network of connection but also its weakness.

If a certain one a perturbation happens, it can bring down everything (the butterlfy effect). It happens with a frequence and an odd we can't predict. And then it behaves in a way we can't predict.

So it is basically the ground of the internet: a non deterministic system used the same way a deterministic system is. What can go wrong?

We can't predict? Thus it will not happen anyway, so let's go back coding.

It looks like a 2nd system effect to me or a cancer of the features.

In JS there are a lot of other stuff to fix before adding syntax. (non commutativity of ==).

But adding stuff like macro, confusing multiline chars it looks like a hell to maintain to me.

Hours of painfully finding what could have triggered the bug!

The code? The macro? Is this a ' or a ` ? ....

Hell, this is hell coming on us my fellow grunt programmers.

This north korea hacking looks more and more like a marketing PR scam... Or at least something very opportunisticly white washing for the company involved in privacy leaking and censorship.

Beurk

Give me an input, the expected output, and I will show you I can do a more readable shorter and easier version of the transofrmation with jquery. The XSLT is so unreadable it requires comments.

I did once a less than 2k library in js that loaded the TTML markup in an hidden div and would show it on an HTML 5 video player with extra formatting.

Why would someone need XSLT in 2014? It was a failure in 2000.

why not talk about soft IRQ?

The signal idea is to implement a user space soft IRQ like communication between process.

But we trigger them the wrong way

if should not be syslog that does kill -HUP daemon to have them release file but daemon that should have callback implemented like "on_file_destroy" and this event should be propagated to the root processes until the bubble up event is being stopped explicitly from being propagated.

The problem with that approach that is simple is it requires a careful definition of defined callbacks

Problem 0: Yes sysinit has problems but systemd brings even more problems (journalctl, PID 1, dependancy Hell ++, undeterministic bootup process)

Systemd is a broken silver bullet for handling the decrease in quality of packaging.

There are problems with sysinit: the first one is the missing link between devs and syadmins in companies: people known as packagers.

For a sysinit to work well shell scripts, permissions, where resources are located, the dependency management has to be done with art and expertise. It is a human job with human which are:

1) a very skilled rare resource, 2) not identified has needed by companies, 3) company's software QA is shitty (it has barely the level it works for me (tm) of quality

Talking about debian, which is considered the distribution with the most talented packagers debian has 2 flows in this domain:

* too rigid: projects goes for logical units of packaging that are consistent and organization of assets in packages that can ease maintaining. Debian has its guideline that makes them «fix» poorly packaged softwares like lateX, python, ruby: cutting language distro in at least runtime, dev, extra. Debian packagers are often debian experts, not upstream software package experts and they first break some stuffs (latex is so poorly packaged on debian it can be considered broken), AND it adds more works

* too much features typical linux distro compared to BSD are pacakging fucking more packages in their core resulting in more work; less attentions to the details and conflicts of functionality/overlaps. This result in more resource drained from the packagers. Like we have 4 shells considered OK for writing shell related stuff, when they have only one: «sh».

The problem of linux vs BSD is symbolized by the systemd vs sysinit: linux is an OS of devops that are super devops, poor coders and sysadmins, BSD is an OS of sysadmins and devs that are good sysadmins and devs, but no devops.

And we still lack in 2014 of maintainer, sysadmins and coders of quality.

Linux/Gnome ... FSF projects are not sustainable in these conditions. They think of free software has an infinite resource of benevolence. And they exponentially overblow the works required for maintaining, deploying ... thus they are mathematically doomed to die under their own weight.

I see BSD as a calvinist boring protestant community turned towards humility doing what is right and linuces as catholic exhuberant rockstars over spending the good will of developers without thinking of the future.

Being lutherian, I still dream of THE right OS that would less terse than BSD.

Forget all the craps about new silver bullet mantra (peer review, agile and peer coding and shit).

Just put them on mandatory level 2/3 support 20% of the time for the code that is written.

When you have to maintain code you fully grasp the concept of «well written code»: just code that is easy to maintain.

And every month try to have them talk about their top 3 reasons that makes them loose time when fixing code.

My fear with peer review is that it is very artificial, what I like with maintaining code is that you see your mistakes sometimes due to trying to write «clean» code.

Magic number deserves a bullet in the kneecap, but magic numbers disguised as factories are worse. A good code is a code where mistakes are obvious. Value these coders.

Avoid timestamps: computer are not perfect, their clocks tends to drifts in non predictable ways (even with NTP). I suspect seen quite real bugs due to clock drifting (and linux non monotonic timer (which impacted python) for a while (but problem is solved)) resulting in packet drops because networks stack don't like to see packets arriving in the future when I was using pyzmq.

http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2013-October/02...

My intuition is we are close to relativistic problems. (Can't prove it, I have to code a kikoo lol form for tomorrow).

The joy of French map that are false around Paris in the suburbs unless you take the highway.

Was using IGN map to go to Paris from Pontoise using the straight line fresh market road from Rouen...

Nearly got killed by gypsies, and false indications ...

The screenshots of roads that disappeared years ago where a carrier near Cormeilles, made a very nice irrealistic suspended road in thin air 20 meters above the ground.

Would have been fun, if in the quite abrupt slope going down on Argenteuil I did not discovered at full speed a roundabout that was not supposed to be there. It makes you wonder why we send satellites in space if we don't update the maps for decades.

Probably a remain of De Gaule plans to confuse the USSR invading us.

Varvakios agora in Athen. Nice, and pittoresque. As secretive as Rungis :)

At least I checked SqlAlchemy prepared IN statement are safe.

Drupal like GnuTLS, like openSSL, like joomla, and like a lot of code out there as always been recognized poor quality unreadable code by my own eyes. (Like some parts of the linux kernel)

Why don't people see the pattern?

Poorly coded software results in security holes.

And IN statements are stupid with prepared statement. If you can leverage a «hit or miss» cache effect with a IN statement, you don't need the IN, elsewhise it is inefficient.

Good solution is when you can do it: replace IN with join avoiding the shameful pit of Mysql poor performances in subqueries.

The other solution is to avoid IN statement because it cannot be protected with the bind trick.

And Stackoverflow has the same solutions proposed everywhere, and since people have no critical sense, this bug is everywhere where people are using IN with prepared statement.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/920353/can-i-bind-an-arra... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1586587/pdo-binding-value... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/589284/imploding-a-list-f... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3703180/a-prepared-statem...

I would be strongly relieved learning he failed his PhD in security: his article is a pure FUD.

Why secrets are needed? Because secrets are unpredictable and thus are the signature of a common knowledge that cannot be guessed when checked against randomness.

Every other solutions are scams especially biometry:

- measure can fail; - if something can be measured it can be captured/duplicated.

Security market is based on fear.

I so wished security efficiency was audited based on the number of security holes they cause sometimes.

PS Feynman biography makes the same statement about the irruption of this fashion of teaching «mathématiques fondamentales» in the US system.

It seems have been part of the fuel about the cargo cult science essay (What is science?)

In the Gleick's book about complex system the author proposes a theory of why Bourbaki (the collective behind the plague called «mathématiques fondamentales») was structured: it is mainly a question of ego.

Poincaré was said to not acknowleged the «french school of mathematics» as the origin of his discoveries. And the institution especially the elite called «ENS» (forming the best teacher for university) is said to have been quite disliking his attitude.

Since Poincaré was heavily relying on geometry, it is said that since they found it unacademic they decided to change the content of math learning to avoid new «casses burnes» mathematicians.

It is very funny at this title to look at the discrepancy between the story of Mandelbrot experience whether it is written in french or english.

French biography states mandelbrot LOVED polytechnic school (another super ivy league) and english said the opposite stating that mandelbrot reproved the lack of use of geometry.

To be honest, I don't know if this is true.