CathyWest

That would have been a reasonable argument if they were found to have been using something like DES-based crypt(3) to hash their passwords. But they didn't, they were just plain text.

I wish there was a guide for "proper" SO questions; my impression is, the only ones are super-detailed questions about some super-particular APIs.

And those questions can in most cases be answered by the docs anyway. The times I've used SO is when the problem can't be answered by the docs, my own experience or that of the team, but then I've received either no answer or a series of non-answers (that should have been comments instead, but a lot of people can't comment).

I also see quite a bit of overt reputation farming there. Like vague questions that receive an improbably precise answer that immediately gets selected. Like "how do u process payments?" (the orthography is usually bad) immediately followed by very specific instructions from a very specific payment processor not mentioned in the question, probably taken straight from its documentation. And I rarely see "closed as too broad" on those, probably because of the quick turn-around.

What a wasted opportunity to not arrange the festival in the actual town of Hammerfest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerfest

What kind of capitalisation convention is that? It's not German, or all the nouns would have been capitalised. Prepositions and conjunctions, with verbs and pronouns some of the time?

I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy.

With technology it should have shrunk by a couple of orders of magnitude. You don't need a room full of old men in green visors cranking away at adding machines to get anything done anymore. Instead technology has only made it bigger.

so I tend to write CTE-based JSON generating views for apps. (Yes, these are not high traffic apps...)

I enjoy using this pattern too. What kind of problems should I expect if it were to become a high traffic app?

It would be the other way around. You wouldn't be able to electronically break in using the zero day after the update.

Then you do the same thing as you would in an unconnected car, break a window.

Refactoring your code to be as simple as possible

Following style conventions for names, whitespace, etc.

Replacing private information with environment variables

Commenting your code to contextualize snippets within your broader codebase.

While I do wish more software was released under a FOSS license, I also wish that these points were a given for any codebase regardless of license or source disclosure policy. I really don't think you can be agile no matter how many agile-trademarked tools and processes you pile on top of your project if you don't do this first.

That was the first place I looked, and by its descriptive nature it is indeed useful for ascertaining that people do in fact say "coke brothers". But the question asked was what the actual Koch brothers say.

It's of German origin, I would have assume it would be pronounced either as such[1], or anglicised with a k as in "stomach", which seems like the most common way for English speakers to deal with the troublesome voiceless velar fricative. Another option is to simply use the English cognate "Cook". "Coke" on the other hand seems far fetched enough that I wondered if it was some kind of a joke at the Koch brothers' expense.

1. https://translate.google.com/#de/en/koch

I keep hearing Americans refer to these boys as the "coke brothers". Is that a jab at their petroleum cracking activities producing massive amounts of coke, or do they actually call themselves the "coke brothers"?

that cost its inventor millions

I figured he had been sued for patent infringement or something. This must be written by someone who buys things at a discount and then believe the difference is an income she has earned and not buying it is a loss.

Does a GPL-compatible ZFS really detract from their FUD churning Solaris business, though?

Those customers can't redistribute Solaris any more than they can redistribute Linux with a CDDL-licensed ZFS. If they really wanted to switch to Linux they could do so today and be in the exact same legal position license-wise. Not to mention they could switch to FreeBSD and be able to redistribute, but again, I doubt this is something very many Solaris users care about. Perhaps the cost of porting their applications away from Solaris is too high, or their middle managers are Oracle fanboys, whatever the reason is, a GPL-compatible ZFS does not threaten that business model.

I think a more likely reason why they pour money into the Btrfs death march while having a turnkey solution just sitting around in the next office over waiting to be singed off by the legal department as CDDL+GPL or Apache or whatever is that each project is the pet of a different pointy-haired boss and they refuse to cooperate internally.

I get it during the Sun years, but why the hell does Oracle continue developing Btrfs when they can just release ZFS under a GPL-compatible license and be done with it? It reallys seems like they are working against their own interests here.

They must have reasoned that entering them in octal or binary means more digits which means more space.

One of the comments mention deionized water. That's something I've been wanting to experiment with, to see if you can realistically keep water dielectric over time as an immersion cooling medium.

Given that commercial applications would rather stick to the super-expensive Fluorinert I suspect it's a pretty hard problem to solve.

Great, then we'll have to listen to inverter whine all summer when the next generation hits their midlife crisis.

Then they were against the dumping of nuclear waste at sea.

I don't get that either, seems like the ideal way to get rid of it. Cheap, secure and with negligible impact on people or the environment.

What kind of furnace needs this high level of air purity to operate? I would have thought a grating that prevents rats and squirrels from wandering in would suffice. I would assume small particulates would just burn with the rest of the fuel with no ill effects.

Schneier is right. Warrant canaries are just another side of the same coin as the sovereign citizen movement. Word games and magical thinking is not going to fool any judges.

While I do think secret warrants are unjust most of the time (and nobody can verify that they are justly applied when applied), the intent of the law is obviously to not let anyone know about the warrant, if you do you have broken the law regardless of how you did it. Any judge that rules otherwise is engaging in judicial activism.

I just don't understand what Greenpeace has against nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster has very well demonstrated that even the worst case scenario, while it sucks for people, is not at all bad for the environment.

I would have thought Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751 would be well known enough to make manufacturers think twice about sneaking in features and not telling pilots about them and CAAs about certifying them.

http://archive.is/NIF8y

Are you 100% American?

US government bonds, the kryptonite of any foreign spy!

50% refers to the mix of male and female people who get distracted by this; in my experience as a technical writer who would always use “he” when I was less experienced, perhaps 70% of women and 30% of men?

But who were these people? I don't doubt that there exists a population such that half of it complains about lack of gender neutral language in technical writing, but it does not necessarily follow that the same half should also be arbiters of techincal writing style.

It was certainly one aspect of my writing I got a lot of feedback on. Changing that habit was fairly easy, and has entirely solved the problem. > I’m not sure what’s political about pointing out that “the user” of eg a computer system is not always a “he”, but if you want to bring the conversation there, have fun.

Back when the convention in English (and various other languages) was that male pronouns were used in mixed or unspecified situation there was no need to point this out, it was given by the convention. Pronouns with masculine grammatical gender being exclusively applicable to men is a recent innovation, without which the problem you are trying to solve wouldn't even exist.

These shifts in meaning can of course happen organically, but I find it very curious that this particular one happened at the same time as the rise of feminism in the 20th century. More extreme examples of the same politicised language is using "womyn" instead of "woman" in order to prevent it from ending in "man".

I think the point is that it's better to work on some 7 year old system hacked together without any craftsmanship with the belief that craftsmanship is nonsense and spaghetti code is a legitimate design pattern, than to work on it knowing there is a better way to design software.

I can't tell whether one version looks more aggressive than the other. As for the extra frames, maybe it's been mangled a few times by things like screen recorders.

You know that and I know that, but often it's easier said than done to convince them of it. I've had users get indignant because I dared criticise their favourite enterprise bloatware like I insulted their mothers. Even as they themselves were struggling with some misfeature keeping them from doing their actual work.

But it does mean that it's easy to exceed their expectations, for example by making the browser back button take the user back to the previous view instead of crashing the entire user session. I tend to try to justify spending time solving technical debt by making development of new dazzling features faster and cheaper, but as long as the users (and more importantly their managers) are sufficiently dazzled if you only throw them a pittance once in a while, that becomes hard to sell.

you’re already distracting roughly 50% of your potential readership

If by 50% you mean 100% of the women having trouble making it through an article with multiple instances of "he" not immediately followed by "or she", that's a pretty bold claim.

I suspect the key factor in people's inability to focus on the central point of the article lies in their political persuasion rather than the shape of their genitalia.

Writing good software can be hard, but it is worth the time and effort.

Is it? I want this to be true because I want to write good software. But I've worked with some very senior developers who would disregard all software engineering and user experience concerns and just spew large quantities of low-quality code that made the managers just as happy, especially since it got done quickly. And the end-users in many niche industries are used to being shipped garbage, so they're just as happy too.