kingaillas

I'm not a webapp dev, but C/C++ always felt unique via the preprocessor functionality that essentially does text substitutions on source code before handing off to the compiler.

Actual flags are useful, e.g. -codegenfoo -linkflagbar, but I hate digging through a maze of -DFLIPOPTION1 and -DUSERSUPPLIEDTEXT="hahaha" to unscramble what code the compiler actually sees, and what went wrong because of the various user supplied strings (i.e. #define overwrites).

If other languages also have this, well ugh sorry. I have grown to despise it.

Anything with templates, type traits, especially when nested. (The kind of spew you get on an compilation error). Even

  template< typename T >
  struct foo<T, std::void_t<decltype(++std::declval<T&>() )>>
       : std::true_type { };

looks terrible and that's just basic.

Haha, I used to do Planetary Interaction in wormhole space, to chill out. It was peaceful, setting up my extractors, harvesting raw materials, then running through various factories to obtain upgrades or finished products.

Of course, loading up my cargo and bringing to market was tense... but I never was attacked, probably because I only went to wormholes from hisec space. (The wormhole farming corp I was in maintained various stations but I went with the not-as-lucrative ones accessible from hisec and skipped the low/no sec ones. As I recall, I stopped a few years ago.)

Don't forget the preferred payment system for ransomware, among cryptocurrencies many technological achievements.

>You still own your private keys but are trusting a centralized organization to keep the other, so it would require both parties to be hacked for the wallet to be at risk

Wouldn't it just require one to be hacked - where the risk is losing access to your wallet? Say an evil hacker destroys one of the halves of your private key, now the wallet is unavailable.

If the risk is - drain the account - then yes, both would need to be hacked in order to get access.

There's a bit more nuance here than merely Citi wants to reverse a wire transaction. The article explains they were servicing debt and accidentally paid the loan off early (rough summary). The debtors could argue they had no reason to suspect error and viewed the payment as settling the loan.

New payments contracts now include "revlon clawback" clause. The blockchain analogy is a buggy smart contract that gets fixed.

>I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today.

Was that before or after listening to NPR and their story about private companies that paid for ransomeware attacks (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1003972313, many many others)?

I had a forced move for work a few years back - they imposed a deadline of a few months but after talking to the other managers and HR, I was able to push it back ~3 months. Basically I said I'm willing to move but I need more time to get it done (put house on market, etc.)

I think if this requirement is in good faith (well, as good as it can be given they are changing their minds on remote employment) and all you need is a few months before you can move, they could add some flexibility to this entirely self-imposed deadline.

On the other hand, I'd also start looking for another job.

>which means I’m being specifically targeted

I don't know about that. Various episodes of Darknet Diaries make it clear stolen password databases are searched for any matching email accounts, which of course depends on the motivation level of the attackers. I suspect a simple "check all emails in this one database for a match in the other database" isn't that large of a hurdle. Your average CS101 class might include an extract emails, sort, merge-compare type of assignment.

And yes, like so many others here, you apparently have the goldilocks algorithm. Easy/simple enough for you to generate on the fly yet secure enough to resist all but nation-state attackers.

To that I say - congrats. But the GENERAL advice to the public at large is that the rest of humanity isn't as awesome as you are, and THEIR password generating algorithms of generated characters plus domain name are easily deduced from a single sample, thus making password managers far far superior to protecting against actual real world threats ("crappy website has lousy security and got breached through zero fault of mine") and not the frequently imagined threats ("I am the target of a concerted effort by extremely sophisticated attackers with infinite time/budget").

Nobody is going to bother with reverse engineering your algorithm, or even bother targeting you individually, when it is orders of magnitudes more likely your passwords will be revealed via a garden variety database breach/leak. That low stakes online account you have? That's also the one likely to have their user account/password database stolen, which was stored plaintext.

Basically the threat model I am worried about is: random website gets hacked and loses its password database. So if criminals hack two such sites and correlate email addresses, they will see two essentially fully random passwords for me. If that happens to you, they might notice a pattern in website url and prefix/postfix characters.

>I distinctly remember a time when all we had was

Sure, and I remember a time before internet (widely available public access) and smart phones. We were also fine.

Which doesn't mean these advances (including forecasts) aren't useful.

Not the poster you are asking this question of... but yes, that was true 15 years ago.

However these days, app stores have proven their massive profitability, so web tech on par with native apps threatens that income stream.

Offering reasonable functionality via web can be a huge win for certain app categories (anything with IAP or subscription) because it is easier to offer payment options that bypass app stores and their mandatory revenue slice.

>We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages.

Frontpage, I'm going to bet. :)

I was an early user of Frontpage, shortly after Vermeer released it. A few months later, it was bought by Microsoft. Looks like Frontpage was absorbed and discontinued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage).

It was handy but I was just messing around with a very simple personal website and most of the time I'd just use Notepad or something like that.

>About the same time Java on webpages was a thing.

Guilty... I wrote a simple java applet to draw a polar plot of antenna radiation patterns. Later I added a calculator applet - after all, how handy would a simple calculator only a website away be?? I should have gone with the trends and converted both to javascript... but I did not.

>Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page

I remember the omni-present "site under construction" animated gif. As in, > 50% of websites had them somewhere.

Follow the link in this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...) for an eye-bleeding collection. Haha!

Not the OP, but maybe they meant chacos? (https://www.chacos.com/)

I have a pair and as an avid hiker and trail runner... I'm not sure I'd walk 15-20 miles in them. I have other better-suited footwear for that!

>What else do you call it

Something other than slavery, which is humans literally owned and treated as property. Maybe what it actually is, a skewed taxation system.

At the bottom, the article says they are not ABET accredited.

I would characterize this situation (of crypto helping perform fast transfers) as a very temporary "advantage" that would almost certainly disappear over time.

For one thing, this advantage over the national bank, is during a WAR. Assuming the war disrupts the national bank, yet over the long term will not also disrupt all the infrastructure that bitcoin needs (cheap high speed computing, available networking, reliable electricity, etc) strains credibility.

I use Linux and Windows at work and home, and both have advantages and disadvantages. I've been migrating more and more to Linux as my daily driver, so my Windows home machine is basically all games at this point, with a Visual Studio install for occasional software development or things that have to be done on Windows. I used scoop (https://scoop.sh) for software installs and it was almost as nice as any Linux distro's package management.

UI issues aside, which I'm not that sensitive too, my biggest complaint with Windows is... I can't easily swap CTRL and CAPS LOCK. Every solution I can find involves becoming an Administrator to edit the registry, or install the SysInternals device driver (!!!) - madness!

I used to have a Mac, and it was a toggle setting. Linux as well, if gnome-tweak or the equivalent for whatever desktop is installed. And at home, I can become Administrator to do this. But at work I can't, the systems are very locked down. However on Linux even as a lowly regular user I can setxkbmap and do it.

This annoys me a ridiculous amount every time I have to work on a Windows machine.

> I can't understand the use-case of needing to do this outside of toy problems.

Not sure, not my domain, but perhaps bioinformatics has the equivalent of the convolution operation on sequences?

EDIT: there is the "reversal" operation. Peeking ahead from the Rosalind problems, I'm not quite up to Reversal Distance (https://rosalind.info/problems/rear/).

I interpret these sorts of statements to be short for "a statistically insignificant number of people play games on macos (or linux)" rather than the literal case where as long as a single person does, it is false.

According to the steam hardware survey, Windows is 95%, Macos is 4%, and Linux is 1%. And to dig deeper you'd need to see what games that 5% of the non-Windows is playing - are they simpler games that don't need graphics acceleration (e.g. puzzle games, roguelikes, etc) or ones that do?

My desktop is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu, and yeah I play games on it. Slay the Spire, Spacechem, even some older MMOs like DDO or LoTRO (which run but at 15-20 fps since that system just has Intel Iris). I'm unable to even start many others (e.g. Grim Dawn) due to not having dedicated graphics.

So yeah it's nuanced but lots of games that need a graphics card don't run or even display on that system.

That's why I have a windows gaming system too. I'm realistic, the market just isn't there. I used to have a Mac (dropped it in 2018) and if I still did I'd subscribe to Geforce Now or just do console gaming.

No source, just memories from when I was there.

As I recall, Brian Valentine sent an email to the Windows division and basically said that easter eggs made the product look bad. Customers don't want to be patching their systems constantly (I was there circa 2000 so in the NT4/2000/XP era, so back when windows update was a website you visited, and the original NT4/2000 bug fix delivery mechanism was the service pack and various rollups) and then also hear it contained easter eggs for funsies.

Microsoft also licensed the source out to companies, governments, universities, etc and it wasn't a professional look. Easter eggs in games - that's fine. Easter eggs in your operating system, that licensees could see - not a good look when the previous product (NT4) didn't have a great stability reputation and Microsoft wanted to pursue businesses with new SKUs like Windows Enterprise, Datacenter, with features like clustering.

BV recognized programmers wanted to insert a little bit of credit so for Win2000 the easter egg replacement was either a link to a webpage (that listed the names of the Windows team members) or a rolling display of those members. Sorry I can't quite remember which it was... I think it was a link to a webpage to keep as much out of the OS as possible.

Remember this was around the time that Excel 97 had an easter egg flight simulator, Word 97 had a pinball game, and Windows NT 4 had one or two easter eggs maybe more (one was the opengl screensaver would 1% of the time draw a teapot at an intersection; the other was a scrolling list of windows team members that I don't remember how it was invoked. So due to this I'm 98% sure what he let into Win2000 was a webpage link). By now, the URL is probably long decayed.

I can't decide either.

Arguments that you are paid the value you bring to the company. If that's true, then companies that profit are ripping off their employees to some extent.

Arguments for "same work same pay". How does that apply to manufacturing where clearly overseas workers making the exact same clothing are paid less than their American counterparts, the exact reason manufacturing moved overseas in the first place? If you think this is deeply, critically unfair, well there are generations of blue-collar workers that agree and probably don't feel a lot of sympathy for tech workers when nobody gave a crap when it happened to them.

Arguments you are paid your market-based replacement value. You get paid less in a cheaper COL area than an expensive COL area, if you actually live in said areas. This makes the most sense to me, just from a competing for talent perspective. Sadly all this does is enrich property owners in high COL areas.

As far as how it applies to remote work, well that falls into the market-based replacement value bucket. If the corp is willing to hire remote workers, then you as a remote worker are also competing against the entire world of remote workers, some of who live in even cheaper areas. This is one of those "be careful of what you wish for, you might get it" situations. I don't see how, long term and outside truly world-unique talent situations, corporations will agree to pay Bay Area wages to remote workers wherever they are. Especially when tech workers aren't unionized, indeed most vehemently oppose being unionized.

I don't see a problem with this... I can't imagine not taking care of your family.

Sometimes, companies fact check what interviewees say. Things like verifying employment, salary, title, etc. This can lead to inconsistent results as mentioned in the original article, when your claimed job role/title and what Apple says after you left don't match anymore.

Kids aren't the only ones at risk - he also mentioned teachers, some of whom don't want to take the higher risk of in-person teaching or dealing with 100+ kids every day that aren't wearing masks.

Is that over reaction? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is, it's really easy to shove the risk onto somebody else because it's more convenient for you.

>I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.

I migrated to Android back in the IPhone 8 and IPhone 10 Max Plus++ whatever era. I just couldn't deal with a $1000 phone.

But now Apple has the IPhone SE which goes for as low as $399.

There is probably a "minimum purchase annual volume" that goes along with a commercial account.

It would mean that a large class of problems that have solutions that can be verified quickly can be solved quickly. Which cuts both ways.

While that means most protocols used for cryptography would need to be replaced (hashing, digital signatures, etc) it also means other combinatorics algorithms (traveling salesman, protein structure prediction) would become solvable which may been boon for logistics and/or computational science.

(I think this is correct) If P=NP there will still be intractable problems; they would be ones where the solutions can't be verified in polynomial time... along the lines of verifying the solution is correct is as complicated as brute forcing the solution.

Note: it's been a while since my computation theory class. ;) I am reading over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem and relearning the fine house of cards theoreticians have divided this problem into. There is a "consequences of P=NP" towards the bottom that sums it up better than I can.

Well for one, the safety of encryption rests on certain problems being intractable. (In a theoretical sense; there are always implementation bugs that destroy security).

If P=NP, then those previously thought to be intractable problems, are actually tractable. And the foundation of a lot of security-related engineering collapses.

>There are lots of crypto projects who have never been hacked

Cyclists have a saying: there are two kinds of cyclists, ones that have crashed, and ones that are going to crash.

I think crypto exchanges can be similarly partitioned: there are two kinds of crypto exchanges, ones that have been hacked, and ones that are going to be hacked.

It's just ideal conditions: lots of money, software, no regulation/oversight, anonymous criminals.