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webhat

799 karma · joined July 15, 2013

Former Security Consultant. Developer with a love of Mashups and Folksonomy. Serial Entrepreneur.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/webhat; my proof: https://keybase.io/webhat/sigs/0ArzXK_VJtV9NfHGGElgiwBVWbhA7fj1v-FJNQXtXzA ]

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webhat··on A Foray into Go Assembly Programming
"I literally copy-paste the middot every time. Who has a middot key?"

I did too, until I found.

http://middot.net/

webhat··on Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater?
I'm sorry, I was trying to be funny. I really found your points valid, and the helpful reminder was very appreciated as it will get me better answers next time.
webhat··on Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater?
Thanks for the answer!
webhat··on Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater?
Thanks for the answer!
webhat··on Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater?
To paraphrase ESR: thank you for this grandmotherly kindness. :)
webhat··on Ask HN: Are NDAs Just Security Theater?
Thanks for the list.

I asked on purpose again for a couple of reasons: most of the answers were over 1 year old, most focus on why people shouldn't ask and not why they do ask or why they do sign.

webhat··on Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
Indeed, and learning to use a debugger will allow you to gain fluency in new languages and frameworks much faster that the simple, albeit powerful, printf.

I remember needing to learn Ruby and Rails on an existing closed codebase and having the debugger take me right to the core of Rails several times to understand why certain things were done in a certain way in the top level code. This allowed me to get acquainted with internals of Rails and how Ruby's inheritance system much faster as well as the existing codebase that was built on top.

webhat··on Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
I go as far as to have a dedicated project notebook for big new projects, I write everything down that I come across that I need to remember or need to question.

I've often been dropped into codebases where there is only a month to question the previous maintainer before all the business knowledge is lost as they move on to bigger and better things. So getting all the questions/queries down asap is the fastest step to get the undocumented business logic documented.

Even when you can't ask the questions I like to turn all the unknown unknowns into known unknowns. :)

webhat··on Why we created a startup for startups
Interesting!
webhat··on Startup Slack Group
I'm one of the admins on SSG, thanks for posting!
webhat··on Coursera is phasing out free certificates
You might be right, although a 50% grade to pass The Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People still seems a little on the low side to me.
webhat··on Coursera is phasing out free certificates

    “The Statements of Accomplishment (free) and Verified
    Certificates (signature track) will be provided to all
    those who achieve 50% or higher grade, and will be released 
    within 1-2 weeks after the final submission deadline closes. 
    Everyone will be notified by email when they are ready. You
    will be able to download the certificate from your course
    records after they are released.”
50% as a passing grade?
webhat··on Grepping logs is terrible
I think binary logging is the wrong word to use. As far as I can tell it's not binary he means, but database logging. Storing things in a database sounds far less scary than binary.

At best it's a NUL separated database structure where the fields are not compressed, which IS greppable just use \x00 in your regexp. At worst he might mean BER, which is an ASN.1 data encoding structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.690#BER_encoding

webhat··on Ask HN: How do you manage your passwords?
For passwords that change I use something similar to the Dominic mnemonic system to add a suffix to the password, this is for passwords that I really need to remember myself.
webhat··on Why do MOOCS have low completion rates?
The pennies are obviously not to cover the cost of the MOOC. It the sunk-cost effect, people are more likely to use or complete something they pay for.
webhat··on Why do MOOCS have low completion rates?
Just asking for a few pennies to take part would up the completion rate and reduce the frivolous sign ups.
webhat··on Why do MOOCS have low completion rates?
I've been creating my own offline lecture archive. There are a number of downloaders which are tacitly accepted and even promoted on Coursera.
webhat··on Why not JSON?
You can't make decisions about what will be standard in 10 years, however don't disregard the chance your software will be around in 10 years time.

I had a number of packages, written in 1998-1999 maintained in debian stable between 2000 and 2010, they were eventually dropped because they didn't work anymore after a big revisions in the parent project.

webhat··on Ask HN: What services and software do you pay for?
* New Relic - Server Monitoring

* Canvas by Instructure - Learning Management System

webhat··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2015)
I love Buffer, if I didn't already have a start up I'd certainly work for buffer, if they'd have me.
webhat··on College for Grownups
There has been some research which suggests that there are some psychological risks in going to college. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/15/leibow
webhat··on Weekly Coding Interview Problems by Email
I didn't walk out, the company said they wanted somebody who did TDD so I wrote an algorithm that created a function that passed all the tests they defined and sent them the function.

Needless to say I didn't get the job.

webhat··on The Puzzle of Indian IQ: A Country of Gypsies and Jews
At first glance this looks racist, at second glance it looks anti-semitic too. Can you explain the value of this article?
webhat··on Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead
It's not that simplistic, data from MOOCs shows that short MOOCs (3-4 weeks) do better than long MOOCs (> 4 weeks), probably it's because the attention wains and there need to be other incentives for people to continue.
webhat··on Unfavinator: A Free Tool to Delete Twitter Favorites
I use IFTTT and Pocket to read my favs, I assume you want to create a magazine.
webhat··on HTTP Shaming
I was recently called overly pedantic for telling somebody they should change an example in their blogpost which used http rather than https to transmit credit card information.

Sad to see such prominent sites use http for transmitting credit card data in the wild.

webhat··on I Quit Liking Things on Facebook for 2 Weeks
After reading this I did the same, one of the results was that I haven't been on Facebook as often. It's not as fun if you can't like things.
webhat··on The S in Rest
I would say yes, I've also advised the author of this mistake and he declined to modify it. This is the less that friendly reply I got:

> You missed the absence of Content-Length in some of my examples? If you're going to be on this internet, friend, you've got to step up your pedantry game.

https://github.com/teddziuba/teddziuba.github.com/commit/fd4...

webhat··on The S in Rest
I got the point exactly, and the paragraph under the example states:

> The obvious problem with this is that we’re given a reference to the product, and not the product itself.

Which isn't the most obvious problem with this example.

You might want to read: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/REST_Security_Cheat_Sheet

webhat··on Roko's Basilisk as Descartes' evil genius
Don't read this Roko's Basilisk will get you!
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