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obiterdictumon The "Clockwise/Spiral Rule" in C

You are right, it appears to be C++-specific and looks like a typo in the link.

C++98, 17.4.3.1.2 Global names

- Each name that contains a double underscore (__) [...] is reserved to the implementation for any use.

obiterdictumon The "Clockwise/Spiral Rule" in C

That's not ideal either.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/lab/cplus/c++.rules/chap5.html

"The use of two underscores (`__') in identifiers is reserved for the compiler's internal use according to the ANSI-C standard."

obiterdictumon Bye, MongoDB. Hello, Cloudant

Does it include chained map-reduce?

obiterdictumon Do Web Developers Ever Learn?

addresses are strange. humans think of addresses in little-endian

No, this is culture-specific. In Russia, postal addresses are written exactly the opposite ("big endian") way.

obiterdictumon Light Table reaches 0.1.0

The reason we want bindings similar to certain popular editors is because we have years of mechanical memory invested in them and for us it means better mechanical speed of interaction with the interface.

Keyboard bindings and general IDE approach are orthogonal concepts. There is no reason you can't have modern innovative IDE with familiar keyboard bindings.

obiterdictumon GCC switches from C to C++

This was just a workaround for the lack of move constructors.

The real problem with auto_ptr is that if anything emits a call to auto_ptr destructor at the point where the object pointed to is incomplete (forward-declared), the destructor code won't run, only memory would be freed.

obiterdictumon Please turn on two-factor authentication

Sorry, a bit off-topic, but that reminded me of one fun fact.

In Russia, most social networks these days require that you sign up with a mobile number. You cannot start using your account without receiving an SMS verification code.

obiterdictumon Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco

It's amazing: a website will make me choose an 8-character (but not more than 14!) password with a number, a symbol, and at least one capital and one lowercase letter, but then it will let anyone who knows my birthday and favorite color change that password to whatever they like.

The most common implementation is to require to reset a password via a link sent in the email (and only then you answer security questions), which solves the particular problem you describe.

obiterdictumon Advanced Flask Patterns

I do not think the usage of thread locals in Flask is a bad idea. Conceptually request-local variables are no different to stack variables in multiple threads of execution, or member variables of objects in OO languages: both change their value depending on some (often) implicit context. We tolerate both, because we've grown accustomed to them.

Server-side web application frameworks are a well-understood and rigid domain: there is only so much variation you can get in the core structure, so it's easy to keep in mind the meaning and scope of Flask's "magic" implicit state variables.

I have used (and continue using) Flask for small- and medium-size projects, and thread-locals so far haven't been a maintenance burden.

obiterdictumon Advanced Flask Patterns

It should be noted that thread locals play well with greenlets, so it works well with gevent-style asynchronous servers.

obiterdictumon RIP, Nokia (1865 - 2014)

old J2ME/Symbian platform

No. Just... no.

I'm really pleased that Symbian is dead (or on life support). It is, so far, the worst platform I have ever had to deal with. Eclipse-based IDE for €300-1300, partner-only premium APIs, completely unusable multi-gigabyte emulator (if you needed to run two instances, you had to install... two copies in different directories!), awful documentation, terrible system libraries, and quirky Symbian C++ dialect... it was quite an experience, but I will never miss it.

Anything we have today is better than Symbian.

obiterdictumon One Million page views on movies.io

This is exactly what I am thinking. If we expect others to respect our software licenses, why don't we respect others' license on creative content they produce, no matter how outlandishly priced or badly delivered we believe it to be?

What baffles me is the amount of rationalisation. I come from Russia, where piracy is a social norm, and if you pay full official price for entertainment products, you are either a sucker, or a rich person asserting your wealth status (I don't imagine much has changed). But Russians never attribute themselves downloading movies and cracking games to some higher purpose: we just like free stuff, and gaming the system for personal gain is a national pastime.

obiterdictumon One Million page views on movies.io

OK, so, it's that post.

Consider the following cases:

1. a company violates a FOSS license by incorporating GPL code and not releasing source code.

2. a company takes an image produced by an artist and sells T-shirts of it without the artist getting compensated.

3. a website/mobile app/elements of branding get replicated (or very closely reproduced) in a new website/app (think Zynga, Chinese/Russian clones of Facebook/Groupon and whatnot).

4. site content gets scraped wholesale, and fed into another AdSense-infested site.

In all these cases, noone lost any money when bits got copied (in fact, sometimes the offending party would produce original work to mimic the product in question), yet doing above things is a no-no, but downloading movies is OK. I don't mean to take a high moral ground here, but it's baffling for me to see the cognitive dissonance.

obiterdictumon It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module

Executive summary:

- The signature: SHA1 HMAC of data and, optionally, a timestamp to expire signatures.

- HMAC key derivation: SHA1 of a secret key and a salt.

obiterdictumon Apple's iOS is "deceptively fast"

It's a well-known technique used by a lot of products. Github, for example, has a little "slide-in" animation of when you click on a folder in a repo to achieve the same latency masking.

obiterdictumon LibreOffice 3.5.4 released with up to 100% performance improvements

Or you can interpret it the other way: before the code could complete X units of work (whatever the metric), now it can complete X + X in the same time (2X).

obiterdictumon Google Chrome Leapfrogs Internet Explorer as the Web's Top Browser

A lot of people are probably not aware of it, as it's hard to keep up with every drama on the Internet when you have things to do. I certainly wasn't until today.

(Yes, I realize the irony of this comment, I should be doing things right now.)

obiterdictumon React is a PHP port of NodeJs non-blocking I/O platform

Judging by the "React in the Industry" section, this was my thought too. In fact, I was sure it is until I saw serious comments here.

obiterdictumon Why Did Zynga Tank After Facebook IPOed?

The reason Facebook went down is the usual immediate post IPO sell-off when a bunch of people that got into the IPO sell their shares immediately to make some quick profit.

Is this one correct, though? I recall that insiders have selling restrictions for 180 days after the IPO date.

obiterdictumon Russian Stock Market has suspended trading

ASX shutdown for 4 hours on option expiry day. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/business/items/201110/s335003...

Also, so did HKEx (for the entire day, on option expiry day!) due to a typhoon (?), as far as I recall.

This is non-news. Exchanges do stop trading unexpectedly sometimes and it's hardly specific to Russia. I'm not sure what was the submitter's interest in it.

obiterdictumon Do Not Use Go for 32bit Development

No, gccgo doesn't resolve anything.

Care to explain? I was under the impression that the recent 32-bit memory usage issues are specific to the 8g implementation only.

obiterdictumon $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

If you are trading only one market, no. If you do arbitrage across two or more exchanges, then it matters.

obiterdictumon The C Conference

I thought it was clever too, but the paranoid side of me thinks if this is to go ahead, Prentice Hall may not like it.

obiterdictumon Clang: Defending C++ from Murphy's Million Monkeys

Because it's hard to add it to the mature infrastructure that was not designed to support it from the beginning. Clang was built from ground up to support good diagnostics.

obiterdictumon Stack Overflow: How to cope with those -1's.

I agree. For what it's worth, my experience has been completely the opposite (disclaimer: I'm a SO addict with rep approaching 20k).

1. I've never got downvoted for asking something that could be found by googling and don't downvote anyone else for it (unless it's the blatant "give me the codez" type of question). In fact, usually such questions are considered a low-hanging fruit for those answering the question (and who know where to look).

2. My spelling/grammar errors get corrected by users with editorial powers (and I try to do the same).

3. I consider this the advantage of the site: incorrect answers get downvoted, correct answers get upvoted.

obiterdictumon TTAGG: Using Social Data to Beat the Market

The trouble with services like this is that in order to "beat the market", i.e. be above average, you have to have information before other market participants. As soon as information becomes public, you can no longer make "more than average" returns with it, because everyone would be trading off it.

This usually means that if the information is any good for profitable trading, it will be quietly used to make a profit and won't be shared with general public.

obiterdictumon The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance

This topic is always popular here on HN. A pain point even.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=561311

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657554

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2345552

However most of these submissions do not sit well with me as they try to glorify introversion as some sort of superpower or an exclusive club, and contain a hefty dose of ego stroking.

obiterdictumon Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily (with former Techcrunch writers)

Why is it a bad thing? I think any site doing startup coverage needs to publish the list of its investors as a disclaimer.

obiterdictumon How to nap

Obviously, (1) it's not very reusable, and (2) doesn't work for office with glass doors and open-plan offices.

obiterdictumon Avenger controller company pisses off gaming community with bad customer support

This remnids me of a story last year about an online retailer who was deliberately rude to his customers to get bad press, because it improved his search engine ratings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?pag...