s3cur3

My experience with small content producers is that their decisions surrounding stopping piracy have almost nothing to do with the economics of it; it’s an emotional decision. I’ve seen people spend 25%+ of their content’s revenue on DRM.

Now, why the major players also pour money into this stuff is just baffling.

I was an early, enthusiastic adopter of Yubikeys at my work. Above and beyond the other issues people have mentioned, though, the one that kills the product for me is the frankly stupid OS integration. The key behaves like “just” a special kind of keyboard which types a long string of gibberish and then hits enter any time you touch the trigger.

I can’t tell you how many times I have accidentally bumped the thing and thereby entered my secret key in:

- text editors - the URL bar of my browser (!) - Slack chats (!!)

The solution seems obvious to me: make a new type of input field at the browser and OS level which accepts U2F input, then reject that input in any text field that doesn’t opt in.

This one issue has made the key way more of a liability than a simple authenticator app for me.

A more generous interpretation of the article’s claim interprets “BS” to not necessarily mean it is false. For instance, if I were to speak condescendingly on a topic I know nothing at all about, I might (unbeknownst to me) actually say some true things... but most people would consider this BS regardless (both the false and the incidentally true things).

This common-sense interpretation of BS agrees with epistemologists’ definitions of “knowledge”—they invariably define it in such a way that a belief must not only be true, but also true for the right kinds of reasons, to count as knowledge (though there is a lot of disagreement about what those right sorts of reasons are). See for instance the “justified true belief” definition and its critics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/

Question for people who have nuked Facebook: what do you do about a job that needs you to have Facebook for, e.g., API keys or group moderation? Did you just create a new, “friend-less” account and transfer the credentials over to it?

No, rather they had a good “I’m a freelance developer” web site that showed two things:

1) Some amount of professional experience in the technology we were looking for a contractor in.

2) An attitude that boiled down to “I write software to fulfill business objectives.” (The opposite attitude is what I characterize as the “hipster coder,” who says “I couldn’t possibly work on your legacy system unless you agree to rewrite it from scratch in $hot_new_stack.” Yes, I have literally had a contractor tell me that before, about a webapp based on a 5 year old front-end framework.)

I hired someone from one of these threads a few months ago. I chose them over other candidates based on a strong “portfolio” web site, showing me the person understood their code existed to serve business values (not the other way around).

Previous discussion, with the official source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842817

> Most people . . .

Citation needed? If we’re just swapping anecdotes, my experience has been that the vast majority of people I talk to are fine with being tracked on the internet, and think it’s a reasonable exchange for what they get out of it.

Is there survey data, for instance, that shows people actually feel strongly about this?

Edited to add: I think the most relevant survey data is people voting with their feet. And despite the 24-hour news cycle of Facebook privacy SNAFUs (both intentional and not), their user numbers aren't really falling off.

It's hard to take people seriously when they say "what Facebook does is profoundly evil, but it's outweighed by the value of cat videos/Crossfit videos/Tasty recipes/reading the political rants of acquaintances I haven't spoken to in a decade." :/

The issue with the present system is that we have one numbering scheme trying to satisfy two very different roles:

- automated dependency management (“can I safely update to this version?”)

- marketing (“do I care about this new version?”)

Oh, the sorted array-backed "map" isn't using B-trees because I wanted it as a comparison point (to see how the LLVM containers fare against the old "just use a vector" advice). So the ArrayMap isn't production-ready or anything... it's intended to give a baseline against which to compare what would happen if you wrote your own dead-simple map replacement with the hope of improving perf.

Worse, this is not on the table to be fixed any time soon in MSVC, because the change would break ABI compatibility.

Every time someone says "just use a custom allocator," I sigh inside... it's so much overhead that almost no one does it, and even fewer do it correctly. :(

Right... this result is one of those examples of why you don't guess, you benchmark, because my intuition is that binary search should be "really fast." Clearly though the cache misses hurt a lot more than my intuitions capture.

In my experience, the big benefit from the SSO vector comes from making it the default and making it easy to use. If I emailed my team to ask them to rethink all their short-lived vectors, no one would change anything... but if I say “prefer this SSO vector to the std one,” they can actually adopt that without significantly changing the way they write code. It’s as much a social problem and developer productivity problem as it is about what’s actually best.

I'm in games, and we really do have lots of vectors of maybe 8 or so elements. The small wins add up across the entire codebase.

I don't have the know-how to write a Rust comparison (I'd happily accept a pull request from someone who does!), but I can take a to-do to add SwissTable benchmarks. :)

Hm, I'll look into it... :)

For those, like me, who had no idea what a “lumbersexual” was: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual

I work on the very small team that develops the X-Plane flight simulator. We’re kind of on the periphery of game dev, but I can assure you, work is not crazy for us.

I was responsible for rewriting the UI more or less from scratch for the most recent major version, and at the height of “crunch time” leading up to the release, I worked maybe 50 hours a week... and most of that was voluntary, because, though I had the option to cut features to make the deadline, I really wanted to get stuff in.

Depends on the target audience for sure. I think most people in software are with you—“just give me text, dammit!”—but I’m my experience selling B2C software, a solid videos drives way more sales than text+photos (ballpark of maybe 20% on a landing page).

They did a follow up changing the scheduling policy for thread 0 (again, still on Windows) and it didn’t make a difference for almost all their workloads: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13446/the-quiz-on-cpu-0-playi...

Benchmarks on the 32-core TR are... disappointing, to say the least.[1] If you’re purely compute bound, it can be a win over the 16-core version, but if memory access is a factor, it’s a wash due to the extra hops to memory. And to my mind, there are very few pure-compute applications that wouldn’t benefit more from AVX2 and the like... in which case a cheaper Intel CPU would still wipe the floor with the 32-core chip.

I’m a huge fan of the Threadripper concept, just wish they hadn’t neutered the 32-core chip compared to its Epyc counterpart.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...

Full-time C++ game dev of ~5 years here. I absolutely run into UB issues at least once a month, sometimes as often as a couple times in a week. I doubt our codebase is of below average quality either. UBsan is a godsend here... without it, this stuff was truly hell to debug.

The elephant in the room here is the WordPress add-on market. There are thousands of devs doing a thriving business selling themes & plugins, all of which have to be GPL licensed, with basically no trouble. If you want a model for successful open source commercial development, that’s it.

I recently upgraded from my 2015 rMBP to the 2018 model you’re looking at. I agree the Touch Bar is a dumb gimmick (for a dev’s purposes at least), but the keyboard has grown on me, and the 6-core/12-thread CPU is a serious boon for dev work.

I wrote up a few more details here: https://tylerayoung.com/2018/07/23/the-worlds-shortest-revie...

As an American, I would raise hell if a hotel owner searched my room for no reason.

OP here. Happy to answer any other questions people might have about the transition from the 2015 to 2018 model!

I feel like the idea of “living through” one’s kids has a lot of negative connotations——pushing them to spend hours a day on something they hate, etc. But there is absolutely something to be said for being able to see the world through your kid’s eyes. They get so excited about things that are totally mundane to adults. (My one year old yesterday had to stop and examine each little hole in the sidewalk as we walked.) That wonder at the world is certainly infectious.

Just a friendly heads up (love the idea!)... clicking "Why Facebook?" works on Chrome, but not Safari (I'm on Safari 11, macOS 10.13.1).

It's linked by their readme, but I've been using a similar command line tool, Bro (http://bropages.org/), for years and am very happy with it. The fact that Bro supports adding new entries (and upvoting the ones you find useful) directly from the command line has made me 100x more likely to contribute myself. (The fact that this project requires a GitHub pull request is a major barrier in this respect.)

This is a very narrow view of success.