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chrishepner

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It stands for "the f-ing article," i.e. the link in the original post.

(When you have to explain it, you realize that a lot of common terminology in the "tech community" kind of sucks!)

I once encountered a 2K+ line script handling submissions from something like a contact form.

If a client submitted a value for which the key didn't exist in the database table, it wasn't ignored - the application would alter the table to add that row to the database so it could insert it.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as "just use the 'url' and 'email' input types for their respective fields."

Using the "url" input type can be a problem, due to strict validation - the validator requires a URI as specified by RFC 3986, meaning that if the user enters "example.com" rather than "http://example.com", the browser considers this invalid, blocks the form submission, and displays an error like "Please enter a URL".

This effectively breaks the form for most users, on mobile or not, so you'd need to disable HTML5 input validation on this form or field.

I am permanently banned from Uber.

About 6 months ago, I noticed I was unable to log in to my account. Resetting the password did nothing, so I sent an email to the local support address. Almost two weeks later, I finally get the following reply:

  I looked into this situation and it appears that this 
  device has been used on 25 different Uber accounts, which 
  is a major red flag for us. We will not be reactivating 
  your account.
  Uber Love,
  Sam
I have one of those "firewall" apps on my rooted Android phone that lets you restrict individual permissions for a given application. By default, I prevent applications from transmitting the IMEI. I assume at least 24 other people have done the same thing.

I sent an email explaining the issue, and they eventually emailed me back saying they would "check in with their engineering team and circle back soon." In May. My subsequent emails have been ignored. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to escalate the issue.

I used to really like Uber, but they sure did their best to keep me from using it.

I took the Dasgupta's algorithms class at UCSD a couple years ago. I don't know the legal status of the PDF there, exactly, but he gave the link out to the class and almost everyone in the class used it instead of a physical textbook.

I thought the text (and class) was pretty good, although I'm sure being in the class helped. You should definitely have some experience with basic data structures, discrete math and graph theory before diving into it.

I use fieldset and legend frequently. I believe Bootstrap uses these in their example forms, so I don't think these are nearly as obscure as the others.

optgroup is occasionally useful for demarcating groups within lists, but this need hasn't come up much in my experience.

I also use figure and hgroup, although more just for the sake of using HTML5 elements than anything else!

Whether this works depends on the site's email validation script: many don't allow the '+' character.

Gmail filters out '.' within usernames (e.g., john.smith@gmail.com and johnsmith@gmail.com are sent to the same account), but this gives you a more limited number of options, and is even harder to keep track of!

Graham's Number 14 years ago

Ron Graham was a close friend of Erdős, so if you were to co-author a paper with him, you would have a Erdos number of 2. ;)