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resc1440

47 karma · joined January 8, 2015

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resc1440··on Counting Pizza with Python
It still has the integer ID in the URL, so if you're willing to drop $20 a week on getting your own pizza, you can still see how many online orders Dominoes gets - it could be valuable information for competitors, or investors, as you say.
resc1440··on Rule to Require Employers to Disclose Use of Anti-Union Consultants
The article says this is repairing a loophole:

> The 1959 law on which the regulations are based already required employers to disclose the hiring of such consultants. But the Labor Department argued that previous administrations had allowed an enormous loophole that effectively exempted consultants who coached supervisors on how to influence employees so long as the consultants didn’t interact with the employees directly.

But won't they just hire the same people as "workforce relationship consultants who are TOTALLY not anti-union"? Isn't there an infinite supply of loopholes here?

resc1440··on A visualisation of all of the money in the world
Normally you're right that no net exposure implies no risk. However, you've completely forgotten the financial crisis? Counterparty risk can completely destroy the idea of "all positions are offset". If I buy a derivative and then re-sell it for a profit, that's fine until the people I bought it from suddenly go under, and now my position is not protected anymore!
resc1440··on There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random()
As an outsider to the field, I really enjoyed reading this paper: http://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html

It's advocating for a particular new kind of PRNG, but it also includes a lot of great explanations and citations for more reading.

resc1440··on My life after 44 years in prison
This assumes that random people die each year. However, if you survive for a year, you are probably very tough, and your life expectancy might actually go up.
resc1440··on Python 3 makes it easier to develop high-quality software
Mitsuhiko has written extensively about Py3 unicode problems, e.g. http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/

I think a lot of it boils down to, sometimes you really really don't want to care about unicode. Linux filenames are one thorny issue - Linux thinks of them as strings of bytes, and a tool is broken if it can't also deal with them that way. Py3 makes it very difficult to do that correctly. There are also issues with stdin/out being opened as unicode vs byte streams.

For web development, the "unicode sandwich" (http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html) works great in my experience. However, I can see his point that for some kinds of tasks, Py3 is unambiguously a downgrade.

resc1440··on Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years
Link for the lazy: https://www.qubes-os.org/
resc1440··on Fuzzing Raft for Fun and Publication
This is super interesting - especially the tool they used. It looks like it interposes itself at the RPC level, unlike Jepsen which intervenes at the network level. That lets it create reproducible test cases in a distributed system, which it then minimizes so that they can be understood more easily. Very cool.

https://github.com/NetSys/demi http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/nsdi_draft.pdf

resc1440··on Flirting with Elixir
Thanks for this interesting answer! I read most of the getting started guide last night and I'll probably try Elixir for a toy project sometime soon :)
resc1440··on Flirting with Elixir
Are macros useful in a web development context? I don't feel like I've been missing them in Django, but maybe I've just forgotten because it's been a long time since I wrote anything substantial in Scheme. (Are Elixir macros similar to Scheme macros?)
resc1440··on Show HN: Wriber – Idea Generator
"dog eats software"

- Examine why dogs will eat poop.

- In what way did many dog owners get very upset when their dog eats poop?

- Is this a wonderful opportunity for their dog to interact with someone?

- Talk about what some dogs are.

- How do some dogs have instincts to carry stuff in their mouths?

- What is the cloud?

resc1440··on Mozilla Blog: Block slow, privacy-invading content, not "advertising"
tl;dr -

* Content Neutrality: Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising).

* Transparency & Control: The content blocking software should provide users with transparency and meaningful controls over the needs it is attempting to address.

* Openness: Blocking should maintain a level playing field and should block under the same principles regardless of source of the content. Publishers and other content providers should be given ways to participate in an open Web ecosystem, instead of being placed in a permanent penalty box that closes off the Web to their products and services.

resc1440··on Show HN: Make a programmable mirror
Might want to electrical-tape over the phone's front-facing camera, and maybe even excavate out its microphone. Just In Case.
resc1440··on Traceroute
I can't zoom in far enough to see many of the hops :(
resc1440··on Releasing jsfunfuzz and DOMFuzz
Jesse's "stir DOM" fuzzer, which fits in a tweet & a bookmarklet:

    pick = a => a[a.length * Math.random() | 0];
    elts = document.all;
    stir = () => pick(elts).appendChild(pick(elts));
    setInterval(stir, 1);
Fun background information: https://twitter.com/jruderman/status/626381997850632192
resc1440··on Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?
Also MarkupSafe - https://github.com/mitsuhiko/markupsafe

It's a little bit meta, but I had lots of "wow" moments. Also, it's a nice example of using C to speed up certain operations.

resc1440··on Early vs. Beginning Coders
I don't know of such a book that's targeted to experts, but you can get a good idea of those things by skimming the first 2 or 3 chapters of Zed's [Learn Python the Hard Way](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html), and Appendix A.
resc1440··on Robust and Efficient Elimination of Cache and Timing Side Channels
One reason is that in many cases, it's easy to do a large number of trials, so this only makes an attack slightly less practical. They go from being able to tell your secret after 10 packets to needing 100 or 1000.
resc1440··on More Boeing 787 issues – Generator controls shut off after 248 days
Cute article about the genre of bugs: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/anthonyv/...
resc1440··on Five new undisclosed Xen vulnerabilities
Amazon's security advisory seems to indicate that they have this capability for 90% of EC2 instances (leaving 10% that must be rebooted). https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/
resc1440··on Live patching for Linux 3.20
And lkml discussion of the follow-up patches: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1502.1/00694.html
resc1440··on Git v2.3 Release Notes
Git push gained the ability to change the remote working directory - but only if that copy of the repo has been set up to allow it.