tonysdg

I'd suggest Cory Doctorow's "ensh*ttification" might encompass the sentiment you're looking for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I'm guessing this deployed on a secondary computer, not on any flight-critical computers; no way it would have passed airworthiness otherwise (even in a demo). As a result, the worst that could probably happen would be the pilot having to power-cycle the secondary computer.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. A small-ish exchange, run by a small number of developer-employees, with limited computing assets. I can easily see someone making the argument that moving cold wallets to an encrypted, offline company machine would (1) free up resources that could be used elsewhere and (2) would make a less obvious target for hackers. Follow that up with no backups -- because let's face it, most individuals and probably a lot of small businesses have no backups -- and voila: you get a bus factor of 1.

Replace strncpy and strcpy altogether with calls to snprintf. It takes a fixed buffer size, terminates correctly with the null character, and safely does everything strncpy does and more. It's a POSIX standard, so it should be portable to most systems too.

And yes, maybe it'll impact performance. Worry about that _after_ you profile your code and have the numbers to show it -- I'd bet good money that 95% of developers will never need to worry about it.

I'd add that The C Programming Language should be seen as a tutorial (albeit an older one that no longer is fully up-to-date in best practices, in my experience) that can serve as a reference in a pinch (it skimps a bit on the corner cases if memory serves). Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, conversely, should be seen as a reference book with fantastic examples and discussion on error handling -- yes, you can use it as a tutorial, but it's a tad dense and you'll likely never need a lot of it.

A quick word of warning: be sure to treat C and C++ as two completely separate languages that just happen to have similar syntax. Yes, you can use C++ as "C with classes" (I and many others sure have at times), but you're doing yourself a disservice most of the time if you do.

Uh, are you thinking mean? Median is lining up every salary, counting to N/2, and selecting the number you happen to fall on.

Is there a reason no one has built a Cygwin-like environment for iOS yet? As in, is it because (1) it's time-consuming, (2) it's tricky, or (3) Apple won't allow it on their App Store?

I know that Allen Sherman did a version of that joke in his "Ode to Fat People" :-)

Fairly certain at least some of those debts can get passed on to your estate and/or children.

IIRC, the idea is to help the (dependents of the) Kurt Cobains of the world: artists who die young and still have loved ones who can now depend on the revenue from the copyrighted works for at least 20 years. But IANAL, so I could be way off.

Presumably (and I'm partially speculating here, since it's not my expertise) because all of the neurotransmitters, hormones, etc. pay heed to the same laws of thermodynamics that everything else does.

Your genes may influence how many calories you burn, the foods you eat may influence how full you feel, your hormones may influence where fat develops and disappears -- but thermodynamics require that if you expend more energy than you take in, the difference will have to come from somewhere, and that's ultimately how weight loss works.

Paper to print my resume out. Got my first job!

> So the question here has to be whether the creator of the machine acted reasonably in designing the machine as they did.

I'm wary of this line of reasoning. No programmer outside of a terrorist organization will ever intentionally design a machine poorly. If a civil engineer -- specifically a Professional Engineer in the U.S. -- signs off on an unsafe bridge, and that bridge later collapses and kills someone, you can bet your arse they're getting sued and possibly charged with a crime. Unfortunately, we have no real equivalent to this in software engineering/programming -- the concept of a Professional Engineer doesn't exist, and so no one can be held accountable for faulty designs.

Yes, this would bring software development to a grinding halt. I for one don't necessarily consider that a bad thing. It doesn't have to be for every project too -- after all, you don't need a PE to sign off before you build a shed in your backyard. Likewise, a web browser or video game probably ain't gonna need that level of accountability. But for a self-driving car? If someone isn't willing to be held accountable for the software failing, I personally feel the system shouldn't be allowed on the road.

Not even close. Chess is a relatively easy target for AI: the rules are well-defined, all of the pieces are visible to both players, and while the state space is massive, it's a tractable problem.

Now look at something like DOTA: while each avatar has specific moves, the combination of when you play them, how you chain them, and where you aim them is very unclear; half the time, you've got no idea where your opponents are due to fog of war; and the state space is infinitely larger than chess' (which is already huge to begin with).

In short, we're just getting started. Chess was always just a stepping stone for the AI folks -- a chance to show how a machine could reason. Buckle up -- it's gonna be a wild ride :-)

A fun article about PostgreSQL and fsync():

"PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise"

https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/

> abuses of sex

I think that's where the breakdown is occurring here: this is ultimately a values-based judgment. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I think both sides of this debate would do well to recognize that this will ultimately come down to one's own personal beliefs on the subject matter.

Put more explicitly: there are those who will consider pornography and prostitution immoral regardless of the specifics, and there are those who have no issues with it assuming it's regulated (and such regulations are strictly enforced/policed) so that only informed, consenting adults can take part. Convincing either of these individuals of the other's position is likely futile.

Scrubs?

Possibly this?

https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility.

I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?

I always enjoyed, "Need to generate a pseudo-random key sequence quickly? Open up vim and ask a friend to close it for you."

On the flip side, however, I imagine it's a lot harder to convince some entity -- an individual, an insurer, a government -- to pay $1 million once vs. $100,000/year for 10 (or more) years. Whether due to psychology (the former might feel more expensive) or budgeting (the latter lets you spread out the cost), the problem remains. It's going to take a non-trivial amount of effort I think to get the American (and possibly other) healthcare system(s) ready for such a change.

Popcorn Linux is a thing, and it's a multi-kernel OS too: http://popcornlinux.org (I would know, I've been working on it for a few years).

> It could be argued that the primary purpose of a government is to make things better for people

As I understand it, this notion only really came into vogue during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. For much of human history, government served as a way for monarchs, emperors, and the ruling elite to maintain -- and expand -- their hold on power, regardless of what was best for the governed. Indeed, we still see remnants of this in pretty much every government on the planet -- some just are less subtle than others. Arguably, we've spent the last 3 centuries trying to subvert this process and bend it toward, as you put it, making things "better" for all.

`sl` -- makes you feel better about mis-typing `ls`!

I do research in engineering, not psychology, but if I had to guess: probably the same way a lot of engineering research comes about. You read the literature, see interesting results somewhere, and questions start to pop into your head based on the reading ("hey, that's cool! I wonder what would happen if...").

The tricky part becomes actually answering that question: designing an experiment to test a hypothesis is deceptively hard. In my area (computer engineering), often times the hardware or software to test your hypothesis does not exist, so you're left searching for analogues and work-arounds that emulate the desired behavior. I could easily see some of these experiments operating under a similar idea.

I feel obliged to ask: are there any modern (post-1990) ISAs where a char _isn't_ 8 bits?

To play devil's advocate: how many/which fingers do you use to hold a needle? I'd guess it's roughly the same ;)

Yup - guess I can't blame this one on my apartment complex's awful ISP. I hope someone posts a post-mortem later.

Using this textbook right now for my grad-level OS class (I'm a student). Definitely one of the most readable textbooks I've ever used -- the authors actually try to impart some personality into the writing. I'm not 100% sold on how they divide the book into 3 parts -- virtualization, concurrency, persistence -- since not everything in an OS fits precisely into one section (e.g., multi-core scheduling is in virtualization but could also fall under concurency). Still, for the price (free/$10 enhanced PDF/$22 softcover) I'd heartily recommend this book to anyone, and I hope it quickly becomes the standard OS book.