milspec

You are "flagging spam/not spam in those lists" but Google may then associate that list (not the content) as being spam or not. Google sees that mail comes from the list and decides based on that.

This is why I never mark mailing list email as spam, even if it is in fact spam.

barely: the DEA buying it for other countries, and the FBI using it for low-importance stuff

Hey, there is more than that!

Lots of programming isn't very visible to outsiders, but it often provides wonderful opportunities. Web and mobile are the trendy career alternatives to the desktop, but there is a whole world beyond that. You might think from Hacker News that all the world is web and mobile, but no no no...

Think of the people writing software for air-to-air missiles. Well OK, it is sort of "mobile", but not in the usual way. These people tend to get paid extra for any overtime and they often get to live in places where houses are affordable.

Think of the people writing software for industrial robots. Sometimes they get to fire lasers. Again, they get to live where houses are affordable.

Think of the people writing software for medical devices, engine controllers, satellite modems, printers (inside the printer), routers, telephone switches, spacecraft, UAVs, hard drives (in the drive itself), commercial HVAC, NSA tools, hospital billing, and so much more.

Natural selection has not stopped ant can not stop.

Here in the USA, currently trans fats are killing people. Some people can tolerate trans fats more than other people can. We evolve to tolerate them.

The same goes for every other not-good-for-you kind of thing we eat. People who tolerate it (or find it nauseating) will survive longer.

Now that many do survive to old age, natural selection can work to eliminate menopause. Today there are those who hit it at 30 and others who hit it at 50 or even later. Some leave more offspring, and this is all that is needed to drive natural selection. We evolve, and always will.

Suppose I'm on Linux, but I want to interact with Windows stuff. (CIFS protocol, NTFS on-disk format, disassembler for Windows executables, Wine-like program, cross-compiler, etc.)

I'll be wanting UTF-16 support. Going the other way matters too; if I'm on Windows I may need UCS-32 support.

Rust should have untagged unions. Obviously, ones that allow pointer abuse would be restricted to code marked unsafe.

Note that a union of two pointer-containing structs is safe as long as the pointers line up, having the same type and offset in each struct.

see replay to TeMPOraL below

Stealth is not a boolean property. What you can do on the ground with giant arrays of huge antennas and/or supercomputers is way ahead of what can be done in a fighter plane, and that is way ahead of what can be done in the seeker of a small-diameter missile.

We were offered a last-minute discount on the F22 which was excellent. Meanwhile, the F35 went up in price... especially after the F22 was canceled. It's looking like the F35 will cost about the same but with far less capability.

The best deal is probably the Silent Eagle. It's an F15 with a bit of stealth (fixed the terrible inlets, tail, etc.) and some other very reasonable upgrades. The SuperHornet isn't bad either, even for non-carrier use.

Heh, not happening.

People will drive. Generally they will take their rage with them to home or to work. Commute length is related to risk of heart attacks and divorce. Your ideas have a huge quality-of-life impact that extends far beyond the road. I could do without the medical problems and violence induced by road rage.

The ideal for quality-of-life is what you likely despise: lots of wide lanes with minimal need to stop or slow down. This puts drivers at peace. No, it isn't ideal for hipsters who have a thing for silly sidewalk cafes, but those aren't most people.

You say "calm", but that isn't how the drivers feel. They get full-on road rage.

BTW, you also get more pollution. Modern car gearing makes 60 MPH (100 KPH) pretty reasonable; cars from the previous century do better at about 2/3 that speed.

pipelining :-)

He could have more stages than a Pentium 4.

MacOS X is BSD with the low-level part of the kernel replaced by the Mach microkernel. Another way to say this is that the high-level parts of the BSD kernel got stuffed into the Mach microkernel. This is a nasty horrid way to design an OS. Microkernels add lots of pointless overhead while making the code hard to clean up.

No, ill-defined non-portable C bitfields are evil.

If you can specify bit endianness, byte endianness, spans of bytes, and so on... bitfields are mighty nice.

I tried this "public transport" in San Francisco. It was a disaster. It takes forever and doesn't run when you need it. This of course is a big city with nice weather; ponder waiting by the curb during an ice storm while your bus/tram/streetcar is cancelled.

Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day.

Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.

...within the jurisdiction of Texas, surely due to lobbying from those who benefit from the PE situation. It's the same as how Tesla can't sell cars in Texas. It's Texas...

You can't even make it to level 0 unless you use an IDE. I guess you're level -1 if you're an experienced old person using "vi" and "make".

Wow, no love for assembly/assembler yet? Enjoy:

Raytheon SI could be the place for you. We are hiring technical staff at all levels, from INTERN (hurry, the competition is fierce) to people with decades of experience. We hire doctorates (PhD), but don't actually require any degree at all. Desired skills relate to reverse engineering, disassembly, emulators, JIT, hypervisors, security vulnerability research, compilers, binary static analysis, formal methods, malware, hacking, boot loaders, x86, PowerPC/PPC, MIPS, ARM, IDA Pro, kernels, constraint solvers, drivers, and embedded systems.

SI is mainly in Florida (Indialantic), Maryland, Virginia, and Texas (Austin, San Antonio). It's a place with extreme flex time, T-shirts and jeans (or shorts even), normally 40-hour weeks with the option for paid overtime if you want it, your choice of desktop OS, real walls (most locations), and lots of mischievous bright nerds with maker attitude. We get you a security clearance, so US citizenship is required.

To apply, go to https://rtnsi.theresumator.com/ and select one of the following job titles:

  * Software Engineer / CNO Developer
  * Static Analysis Research Engineer
  * Vulnerability Researcher / CNO Analyst

(note: the "Melbourne" location is actually Indialantic, where you can get a house within a mile of the beach for 5 figures)

They shouldn't do that. OTOH, anybody with a security clearance ought to be able to have the agency assign a disinterested person to do that ASAP. Without this, a foreign government can trivially send agents to date people who might know interesting secrets.

Unless refusing orders would mean somebody else jails you, no you haven't been in that situation. The deal is that you follow orders and maybe get jailed/executed after losing a war, or you disobey orders and definitely get jailed/executed right away.

Nope, a network engineer is way different.

Much closer would be writing boot loaders and compilers.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Nice. You'll change your tune if you ever find yourself in that situation.

Yes, it was ruled invalid. That doesn't make it invalid. That ruling was pure evil. The trials were a sham, existing only so that a democracy could participate in dishing out victor's justice. It's revenge, pure and simple, coldly ignoring the pressure that people were under.

I could inform you about non-secret stuff like culture, but you wouldn't believe me. You want to believe that these are horrible small-minded people who don't think twice about violating your rights. The reality is they are anything but that.

That sounds like a fucked company.

FYI, this doesn't happen at Raytheon SI. They're mainly in Florida, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas. They're hiring. Desired skills relate to reverse engineering, disassembly, emulators, JIT, hypervisors, compilers, binary static analysis, and embedded systems. It's a place with extreme flex time, T-shirts and jeans (or shorts even), normally 40-hour weeks with the option for paid overtime if you want it, your choice of desktop OS, real walls (most locations), and lots of mischievous bright nerds with maker attitude.

Sure there is.

Stealth capability isn't a boolean property. Intermittent detection isn't enough to target an aircraft. Being able to track from the ground, with numerous antennas and supercomputers, is much easier than tracking from the limited-diameter head of a radar-guided missile.

The Flinn effect has run out of steam. We're starting to creep the other way, as one would predict.

The words "or similar" are what I hate most.

On the web site, cars are listed by class. I care about models, not classes. I see the example car, google it to determine if I like it, choose it, and then... show up at the place and find I'm given some horrid substitute that I don't know much about. Oh, it's a "full size sedan" and all such cars are interchangable? No, really, they are not.

It is super-important that I know exactly what I will end up driving. I'd like to know the options, trim level, and ideally even the color.

Best would probably be that I check a box for every acceptable model, with a minor discount if I check lots of boxes. (being non-picky makes my order easy to fulfill) This way I can exclude models that I hate, and I have plenty of time to research all the different choices in advance.

I'm 40. I create zero-day exploits at a government contractor. People like me have tame lives and families, so we don't live anywhere near San Francisco. We live in places like Texas, Florida, Utah, and Nevada. In some of these places you can get a suburban house for 5 digits.

P.S. you're pwned.