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msm23

103 karma · joined April 3, 2015

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msm23··on Be Productive Anywhere: Strategies for Better Remote Work
That would be just over thirteen and a half cups of water, which may or may not be a lot depending on heat, humidity, activity level, and most of all, are you thirsty?
msm23··on Alcohol is a direct cause of seven ​​forms of cancer, finds study
> The study, published in the scientific journal Addiction, concludes that there is more than simply a link or statistical association between alcohol and cancer that could be explained by something else.

This isn't published to any of the major health journals, rather it's been published in the journal Addiction which probably doesn't have the most balanced view on the role of alcohol in society.

msm23··on The axle count of trains in Switzerland must not be a multiple of 2^8
The source http://imgur.com/DrEinPB states the problem using "256" not "2^8". I'm not sure if the tweeter is trying to be clever, but he isn't saving any characters by using the exponential notation.

If you're trying to save characters in a tweet, you don't have any savings in using exponential over decimal for base two until 2^14.

msm23··on Live coverage of Juno's Jupiter Orbit Insertion [video]
You can view a live simulation using a Mac/PC app downloadable from:

http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/eyes-on-juno.html

From the description on the page: In this interactive visualization, you can ride along with the Juno spacecraft in real-time at any time during the entire mission. For example, watch the arrival at Jupiter on the 4th of July, 2016, or see Juno use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to pick up speed, or just learn about the science of Jupiter and about the spacecraft itself. You can even turn on and off the magnetic field, aurorae, and the radiation belt, all in 3D! All of this and more is waiting to be explored.

msm23··on Typography of “Alien” (2014)
If you enjoy this kind of music, you'll like Shostakovitch. His 11th Symphony has this same style of music, and I've always felt like I was watching Aliens while listening to it. The two minutes in the following clip have the same build-up, rhythm, and style as the Bishop's Countdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVL3vtZ-z6g&feature=youtu.be...
msm23··on Air gaps never exist (2011)
Never thought I'd see it, but here's the solution to the expert problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM

Credit to D. Scott Williamson, Expert

msm23··on Summon – Get Your Secrets into Source Control
Running

  ps auxwwe
on Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unix-en will show all processes for all users with their complete environment.

Environment variables should not be used to share secrets.

msm23··on The Phlogiston Theory – Wonderfully wrong but fantastically fruitful
http://pharyngula.wikia.com/wiki/Gnu_Atheists

"Gnu Atheists is a pun on the label New Atheists that quickly took on a life of its own. As a pun, it is equivalent in meaning to New Atheists, and the two can be substituted for each other anywhere they occur."

msm23··on Tsunami alert as Chile hit by powerful earthquake
Their live thread is here: https://www.reddit.com/live/vlfanix4u5u8
msm23··on Myths about /dev/urandom
I prefer to trust the NSA on these matters. They end up saying much of what the author has written, but they make it clear why you want to use one vs the other.

The excerpt below is from https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/I43V_Slick_Sheets/S... (which in turn also references https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/I43V_Slick_Sheets/S... )

Unix-like Platforms (e.g. Linux, Android, and Mac OS X):

Application developers should use the fread function to read random bytes from /dev/random for cryptographic RNG services. Because /dev/random is a blocking device, /dev/random may cause unacceptable delays, in which case application developers may prefer to implement a DRBG using /dev/random as a conditioned seed.

Application developers should use the “Random Number Generators: Introduction for Operating System Developers” guidance in developing this solution. If /dev/random still produces unacceptable delays, developers should use /dev/urandom which is a non-blocking device, but only with a number of additional assurances:

- The entropy pool used by /dev/urandom must be saved between reboots. - The Linux operating system must have estimated that the entropy pool contained the appropriate security strength entropy at some point before calling /dev/urandom. The current pool estimate can be read from /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail.

At most 2^80 bytes may be read from /dev/urandom before the developer must ensure that new entropy was added to the pool.

msm23··on Python Enhancement Proposal 495: Local Time Disambiguation
I believe the use case is for scheduling systems that need to do something at (say) 1:30am. On every day at 1:30am, please run the accounting job.

In the US, once a year you either have to have some locking system set up to avoid the second run (leave a trace that the job has already been started for the day). I believe the person proposing this thinks that it would make this determination easier.

The problem is that it only solves half the trouble caused by dual timezones. There's another day of the year when 2:30am (in the US) doesn't happen at all. If something is scheduled to occur once per day at 2:30am, then that day it is not going to happen.

There are other workarounds available such as avoiding the magic hours around 2am (in the US). But it seems to be a common problem that everyone seems to keep re-solving.

Storing the timezone with the time doesn't really solve the above issue.

msm23··on Python Enhancement Proposal 495: Local Time Disambiguation
Yes, you could get the information from the timezone, but how would one do that in code?

The only time that one has the time fold is when you turn the clock backward (let's just call that shifting from daylight savings to standard timezone). And this would only affect code which used wall clock time (time as it's read, e.g. 1:30am PDT), and would also only affect code which wanted to run something only once at a time within that fold (e.g. 1:30am ... not on both 1:30am's).

So, using the timezone method, just check to see if your current 1:30am is in your daylight savings timezone. Hurray! You're in the clear. Go ahead and do that thing you wanted to do only on the first 1:30am.

But the next day you're going to run into a problem. The only 1:30am you're going to get is in the standard timezone. So now you have to check for this timezone change only on the day of the change, which is yet another piece of data you have to keep track of. On the day of the change, do this timezone comparison, and on every other day don't worry about it.

When the clock hits your interesting time of 1:30am, just check to see if today is the day of the change, check what the current timezone is, check what the daylight savings time zone is, check to see if those those two values are the same, and now do your thing. Otherwise, just do your thing.

All of the above also ignores that people change times at different times (11pm, 1am, 2am, 3am), some don't change a full hour, and some don't change at all.

The proposal gets rid of all of that convoluted logic in everyone's programs, and instead it provides a single boolean value: is this the second time I've seen this time because of daylight savings shenanigans.

msm23··on LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
The author pointed out that there is an additional Privacy Controls section in Groups, Companies & Applications as well as under Profile. However, there is yet another Privacy Controls section under Account.

    LinkedIn may use cookies and similar technologies
    on third party sites to understand my browsing interests
    and target ads and personalize services accordingly.
If you're going to have a "Privacy Controls" section, then please do not be creepy and spread such controls through three separate sections.