paulhodge

I don’t know what the OSX protection was, but that’s probably Meltdown. Meltdown = using native code to read kernel/system memory.

Spectre is the one that can be done with JS.

Yes javascript is sufficient.

I think Spectre is theoretically possible with just untrusted data (not just untrusted code).

It would need an existing trusted program that has a branch-predicting loop like the one in the paper. The attacker would feed untrusted data into the loop and then observe secrets through cache timing.

It's weird code, so it's probably unlikely an existing program would have it, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. The attacker would also need a high-precision way to measure the timing of the operation, which also might be hard to find in an existing program, but not impossible.

Just something else to keep you awake at night!

Yeah I also withdrew 5 figures of cash during the crazy period. I have an old Coinbase account.. I think there are worse delays/limits put on new accounts.

For sure, if everyone did a bank run then there would be a liquidity shortage. But saying that is wayyy different than what the article said, that most people couldn't even withdraw $1k.

They're different narratives but I think they are both in play.

If you ask a Bitcoin investor about why they invested, then they might explain it as a store of value, "digital gold", or etc. With that narrative, Bitcoin makes sense in the world, and isn't just a fad. And the erratic price is just a growing pain, it'll stabilize eventually.

But of course, the real reason many people are buying BTC right now is because of the speculative nature, they want to get rich quick. If someone's investment in BTC is significantly larger than their investment in bonds, commodities, real estate, etc, then "it's a store of value" is probably not the real reason they're buying BTC.

Is that based on the live buy orders? If the price dropped below 10k then I think you would see a ton of new buyers (including me)

On GDAX the trade volume for BTC/USD is now about $1.4 billion per day. And there are other exchanges too. So yes the market could fulfill that trade. Would probably bring the BTC price down but it wouldn't be catastrophic.

Sure you're right, some people would stay invested, some people would even re-invest during the price drop (dead cat bounce).

But the previous crashes weren't caused by any real news of a significant weakness of Bitcoin, so if there was news like that, then the crash would be worse than we've seen.

Big difference is that Bitcoin has all the right conditions for a bubble pop. If someone did a 51% attack, this would cause people to lose trust in the currency, everyone would cash out, creating a bank run, which would be a self-accelerating process that drives the price even lower. So even if the network recovered the next day, it would take a long long time to rebuild that trust.

Whereas with the internet, if someone is able to knock out critical infrastructure one day, engineers would figure out a way to fix/reroute it, get it working a few days later, and everyone would happily log back on as soon as it's working. Although maybe they would throw out their "smart" coffee machines and etc.

It's not a technical article. I think it's safe to assume that 1) The people implementing this aren't idiots, and 2) The "hash" is probably referring to a "perceptual hash", where very-similar images would show up as the same.

Async/await is the replacement for promise chains.

Honestly if you want to get out of your comfort zone and really start thinking like a backend developer, I would recommend using a solid, proven platform like Java. Specifically you could start with Java 8 & Spring Boot.

The differences between frontend & backend: frontend code tends to be more loosey-goosey, less robust. Generally the goal of the frontend coder is to write lots of features in a short amount of time. Backend development is more "slow", you still want lots of features, but they need to be robust and work correctly 99.99% of the time.

For that reason, I think the best way to think like a backend developer is pick a language that doesn't have dynamic objects (like Python). I'm not saying that Python can't work, I'm saying that using a static-type language will help you outgrow any sloppy thinking habits that people tend to get when they spend too much time in Javascript.

Hiring wise, Java is still a very in-demand skill. Tech wise, Java is an extremely stable and proven platform that will serve any project well. It's "boring" technology (which is a good thing). If you really want to change your thinking, then try to stop gravitating towards shiny things and instead use a "boring" platform.

Is this being posted for humor value?

This was written in 2014, the researchers saw a small trend and extrapolated that the trend would continue, causing 80% user loss from 2014 to 2017.

Since 2014, FB's active user count has increased from 1 billion to 1.7 billion and the stock price from ~60 to 120.

This article is a great example of a very terrible and very wrong prediction.

The games you're talking about (competitive games, games where 1 frame drop is unacceptable) are a very small & niche part of the market. Look specifically at modern consoles- every console has builtin architecture that leads to a minimum input latency of 67ms. The game can add more latency (and most do), and a lot of popular TVs add more latency on top of that. Here's a database of game input latencies, it shows that even a lot of successful games have latencies of above 100ms: http://www.displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/

So if you're talking about the "highly latency sensitive" players, then by definition those are only PC gamers, and only a small fraction of those players. The addressable market of gamers who tolerate 100+ ms of latency is very large, definitely large enough to build a business on top of.

React is nice and it's on the right track, but it still has a ways to go before it takes jQuery's crown. JQuery is absurdly useful, it's downright silly how much you can get done with jQuery.

Open source contributions aren't as useful for a hiring decision as you imply. Did the candidate spend several days working on a small change? Does the candidate only do quality work when it's something that is personally interesting to them? If yes to either of those then they might still be a bad hire.

Don't get me wrong, I love to see open source work, it is a plus and it definitely helps paint the picture of what the candidate is passionate about. But just having impressive open source work alone is not enough to make the technical interview unnecessary.

> and ace the technical interviews

If there's an IQ test after they ace the technical interviews, then that's a really weird order to do the interview, but I don't think that's the situation that the above comments were talking about.

If I was being obtuse then it was unintentional. It was a real suggestion. If people really want reverse TLD names then they should do it, and if the community likes it, it will catch on. FYI there are already some package names out there with ".com" on the end.

Dots are allowed in the package name, so there's nothing stopping someone from having a package named "com.sandra.stickman", if they are really inclined to do that.

Most likely there is just a dumb reason behind it, like a coder just forgot to account for the drive letter in some new code. And they don't want to roll out a new version right now when they're about to start shipping.

> But that seems to be exactly what Luna is going for, if I understand the site correctly.

Yeah, I'm withholding judgement on Luna specifically, until we can see it in action. Their model could be a good one, it all depends on whether they treat the text representation as a first class citizen or not.

> We rely on text to represent what's best written as text.

Yes exactly. And if you look at the common methods for how knowledge is represented, in mathematics or any field really, it's very roughly around 80% knowledge as text and 20% graphs/diagrams/figures.

An image can be extremely helpful and illustrative if appropriate. But almost nowhere do you see people communicate primarily with images.

Text is king. I think if the programming environment doesn't embrace text as the primary input method, then it's not really good as a general-purpose environment; it'll only be successful in niches.

Yup. The actors don't even need to trust each other that much, because they each still need to use their public key to execute a transation. The level of trust is just that everyone will play nicely, such as not purposefully ignoring transactions.

The Bitcoin model is good at incentivizing actors to play nicely. Banks have no need to create this incentive, it's already in their interest. The Bitcoin mining system also solves another problem: how to evenly distribute new money in a fair way. Banks have no need for that either.

It's back up.

Not to mention that some of these data sources are terrible and completely unscientific. Like "respondents to a Harvard Business Review survey". Or seriously.. "Percent rise observed by a Harvard professor" ???

Don't worry, Proxy is still on the way, and that will still give us a tremendous ability to write terrible, unintelligible code.

Are you talking about the size limit (of about 2000 chars) on url strings? That's not a GraphQL thing, that's a limit imposed by certain browsers. If your request data might be bigger then it needs to be in a POST.

More specifically.. a link that doesn't touch the reference count is a weak reference. It's a known strategy and it does avoid the problem where a cycle can't be collected.

If the weak references are safe (as in, their pointer is assigned to 0 when the target object is collected) then I think there can be performance issues (compared to the competition of a tracing GC).

If the weak references aren't safe, then you have a data structure that's more in the realm of manual memory management, so it's hard to draw a fair comparison with fully memory-managed objects.

Nice blog and content, but for god's sake don't mess with the scrollbar / scrolling speed!

It's not really CPU intensive. To turn a 5-bit char into an 8-bit one, just do a lookup into a tiny constant array. Doesn't even introduce any new branches. Roughly the same performance as iterating over every character. (which you're probably doing anyway if you need the conversion)

The savings aren't just memory, it's probably a performance improvement too. Fewer allocations, fewer pointer indirections, and some operations (like equality checking) become O(1) instead of O(n) for these tiny strings.

Sony did buy Gaikai, and they have been using their technology in a few PS4 services.

OnLive had a pretty aggressive trove of patents, and when OL finally shut down, Sony bought their patents. So the company wasn't really acquired, it was just a fire sale.