borkabrak

Good point. I think there's real value in replacing even just the verbiage of "Closed as duplicate" with something like a "Related Questions" section. It would remove a lot of the hostility, intentional or not, felt by newcomers making their inevitable mistakes, which goes right to the heart of one of the major goals Joel mentioned in the article.

I'm not sure a strong case can be made that Google should be obliged to do that. There already exist TLD suffixes reserved for testing. ".dev" just isn't one of them.

This.. seems to resolve every issue I might have otherwise had with the story, including the impulse to yell at Google about it, but the author himself makes a fair case for not doing that.

It turns out that part of the way the internet is declared to work includes reserved TLDs to be used for testing. So the burden of responsibility for avoiding a situation such as the article describes lies on the developer to use one of those reserved TLDs instead of ".dev", which anyone could (and now, has) come to control.

I guess we're wandering a bit from the topic, but I used to feel the same way about, of all things, that childhood pastime of spinning around with your arms out. I spent more time than I'm comfortable specifying believing that every revolution put me in a slightly different universe, and that in order to get back, I'd have to perform exactly as many counter-revolutions in the opposite direction.

While this may sound insanely OCD, I remember thinking that I didn't have to get the number of counter-revolutions exactly right -- within a half-dozen or so should be "good enough".

I guess I was an imaginative child.

I apologize if this is too far off-topic, but all this talk of "focus" lately keeps reminding me of A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, where a much more sinister (and more sci-fi) version of it is called exactly that - they forcibly "Focus" a group of people into the office equivalent of slave labor.

Great read.

Just that, when you run '$ git nonstandard-subcommand', then the git executable looks for anything executable in the path that is named 'git-nonstandard-subcommand'. Then it runs it. That's all. But at that point, git could have been doing something to the environment before invoking the custom script.

Say someone decides to mark all the significant events in his life. And notices that it's beginning to spell words.. maybe a neat story?

Holy cow, was this a refreshing perspective.

I'm one of those underrated engineers who has had trouble getting past nearly every phase of the hiring process at various times. It's frustrating because I'm pretty smart and very passionate about building software, especially tools.

This bias against having the wrong keywords on your resume is incredibly unproductive,I agree, but I would guess it's a result of how little you can actually tell about someone from just a page or two of their work history, which is all most companies have to go on from a resume alone.

I am dying to get some company to take a chance on me, to someday have the benefit of a real mentor, and to be given a real opportunity to feed all this ambition that just won't go away.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that, either. We're here, we're waiting, and we are legion. It's time for a solution to the problem of how to put us in touch with all those hiring managers that complain about how hard it is to find talent.

That's one where experience playing darts really helps. :-)

She's right about squaring on each iteration, though. And granted, a square root is much more expensive, though done only once. Which method is faster would depend on the number of iterations.

Honestly, just stand a little bit farther back. The main factor seems to be the angle at which each participant has to crane their necks in order to make eye contact.

The dismissive exaggeration with which this comment describes the topic seems to indicate a hostile disdain that I find confusing, all the more for how common it seems to be.

I can't quite get my mind to really understand why some viewpoints respond with aggression to ideas like what the article calls psychological safety.

I think it might have to do with how it's the aggression itself that were being called on to remove.

I'll take two of this on a t-shirt, please.

I would rather have incomplete knowledge of a topic than none. The toughest part of learning something, like so many other cases, is in getting started.

Also, I can't be sure pending research into this, but I would be surprised if these reports ended up worse than the typical news story attempting to cover such things.

that doesn't mean we treat them like sub-humans... we just have less patience with the shit they are inevitably going to give us.

While I have difficulty agreeing that the homeless generally want to be, it seems worth noting that they're not better than normal people, any more than they are worse - they are normal people, with the same charm and/or asshattery as the rest of us. They're just in a situation most of us (or so I think) find singularly undesirable.

This has really got me wondering: What would be a format that is fundamentally readable by both humans and computers? And what does that question really mean?

Without looking into the source, I'd bet someone tweeted the "exploit", just to make the point that going to that page basically runs arbitrary javascript in your browser.

I love this idea. Unfortunately, everything I tried gave me:

    Sorry, I couldn't do this search.

    Could not find a location matching "Nashville, Tennessee"

One more reason (as if I need more) to be thankful I do at least have a roof over my head.

Great idea, but -- why limit it to one site? If bandwidth is the concern, I'd still suggest making available a small suite of sites of special interest to the homeless.

I agree that a five-second startup can hardly be said to break usability, especially for something that many people will leave running for a long time.

That said, though, if I was accustomed to one of my primary tools taking a half-second to start, I think I'd miss it pretty bad if it went away.

Just the fact that people on both sides (glibc and emacs) are treating this so seriously seems to indicate a rather admirable dedication to keeping the quality of the software as high as possible.

May I inquire after your basis for the apparent certainty you have for this position?

If free will didn't exist, it would be necessary to create it.

My PC must not be "proper".

Aw, snap.

Hardcore vim user seconds this.

It's about time a Comcast rep showed up here. :-)

Good point. It is important to realize that being too obsessive about security is possible, and to know a reasonable point at which to draw the line.

But there is a difference between the two types of attack you describe that seems to change the rules on the web at least somewhat.

The difference is risk to the attacker. If I start punching someone on the bus, getting thrown off is the optimistic outcome. I could reasonably expect to be arrested, or assaulted in return, possibly fatally.

But if I post malware on the web, the worst I could reasonably expect is that the offending content is taken down, my account with that host rescinded, and assuming I do nothing to conceal my identity, I may become known as the type of scumbag who does such things. I grant that much worse results are possible, but it just doesn't seem realistic to expect much worse punishment, so long as a government or large corporation wasn't a serious victim.

Or so it seems to me. Thoughts?

Your points are well-taken, but I would expect academics to be the only demographic more likely than governments to compromise a well-designed security system.

Although I suppose the academics I mean aren't undergrads..

Try David Graeber's Debt, The First 5,000 Years

:)

I find this viewpoint surprising, given the problems with arbitration pointed out in the article.

What are your reasons for preferring arbitration? Are the courts in Brazil that corrupt? If so, how would arbitration be better?

Me, too. I just turned 40, and got carded for alcohol two days later. I've always looked far below my age, but I have no guarantees about how long that will last.

I'm only getting better as a developer.