euid

Oh, yes, it's far from ideal.

I'm reminded of the ArchLinux AUR, which deals with a problem kind of like this. AUR managers show a diff of what changed in a package on each update.

Perhaps one could make extension auditing easier by scripting together a Git repository from extracted xpis, and presenting updates as patches to that repository. This is probably only viable for high-security environments - it's not with it in the common case.

Of course, the real fix would come from Firefox itself: it should provide signed extensions and a way to tie them back to Git repositories with source code, which would eliminate the need for the above automation, and allow people to crowdsource extension auditing.

You can audit the code of a Firefox extension by unzipping the .xpi file in the extensions directory within your browser profile directory.

Not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

Alternatively: I was thrown off by the new tab behavior in Tree-Style Tabs and didn't want the complexity of a tree of tabs. Vertical Tabs Reloaded[0] gives me the "tabs in a sidebar to the left" without the complexity.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

Yeah, when I worked at thousand-person companies it was like this:

CEO -> SVP -> VP -> Eng manager -> IC

Or, alternatively,

CEO -> Director -> Manager of managers -> Manager -> IC

I didn't feel like either needed more middle management (each had about ~2k employees), but in the case of the latter some reorganization would have helped (some managers had 50+ reports).

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 - https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Why_Johnny_Ca...

Compact mode, which Reddit also offers, is an easy way to satisfy both camps. Set the default to whatever your users prefer (determine this with A/B testing) and allow the other choice in Settings.

Totally agree. I did government research for a while and published papers. Don't exclude them - anyone at the intersection of government work and research is likely to have meaningful contributions to this website.

In this contest, you are to intentionally insert a difficult-to-detect bug into otherwise legible code. In the obfuscated C contest, you are writing obfuscated code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation_%28software%29

Emulates Vim quite nicely, too.

Since that page links to

[1] http://git.suckless.org/sbase/

instead of

[2] http://git.2f30.org/sbase/

I'm guessing [2] is a mirror, and [1] is the original Git repository. They appear to have the same content.

Then you add an optional CLI argument that makes it skip the prompt, and use that version in scripts.

There is no reason in principle, and you can even do it for kicks.[1] The only issue here is a practical one, as the parent poster described: from an end-user perspective, browsers do SSL/TLS better than ad-blocking proxies.

[1]: An example from the other side of the coin: http://www.wired.com/2010/03/packet-forensics/

It's a poor choice on the author's part

http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/

    Use a HashMap when:
    
    - You want to associate arbitrary keys with an arbitrary value.
    - You want a cache.
    - You want a map, with no extra functionality.
    
    Use a BTreeMap when:
    
    - You're interested in what the smallest or largest key-value pair is.
    - You want to find the largest or smallest key that is smaller or larger
      than something
    - You want to be able to get all of the entries in order on-demand.
    - You want a sorted map.

You probably want something like pyfakefs[1], a reimplementation of Python's (old) filesystem modules for the purpose of testing.

My guess is that either you will have to write it, or you will have to convince a C++ developer that it is worth writing cppfakefs.

Otherwise, you can build a test_root_dir RAII object that creates a directory in /tmp and does the cleanup automatically in its destructor.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/pyfakefs/

For those who don't wish to read all the news fluff to hear about a mathematical discovery:[1]

Abstract. We show that there exists pairs of consecutive primes less than x whose difference is larger than t(1+o(1))(log x)(log log x)(log log log log x)(log log log x)⁻² for any fixed t. This answers a well-known question of Erdős.

Their "key proposition", as stated, is:[2]

Proposition 5. Fix δ > 0. Let m < Uz⁻¹(log₂ x)⁻² be even and let Iₘ ⊆ [x/2, x] be an interval of at least δ|ℝₘ| log x.

Then for x > x₀ (δ, C_U) there exists a choice of residue classes aₙ (mod n) for each prime n ∈ Iₘ such that

p ∈ ℝₘ ⇒ p ≡ aₙ (mod n) for some prime n ∈ Iₘ.

[1]: Here is the paper linked: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5110v1.pdf (strangely, while the news article mentions two papers, both links go to the same one in both the original and Wired articles ...).

[2]: I changed all instances of q to n in this so that I could type most of the subscripts, but any errors are mine.

If you are able to view this, it is a "United States Patent Application Publication" that is found by following the `view pdf` button on the above link:

https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=patentimages.st...

Searching on the USPTO website returns no related patents:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html

The indication, to me, is that the patent has not made it past the application process.

In some cases, you might be reading poor-quality mathematical writing.

According to my generalization of some advice from Knuth:[1] in a good math text, definitions of terms are presented as they go along, and they are explicit about what means what. Furthermore, one of the factors that determines the quality of mathematical writing is

- Did you use words, especially for logical connectives, whenever you could have used words (instead of symbols) to express something?

and

Try to state things twice, in complementary ways, especially when giving a definition. This reinforces the reader’s understanding. [...] All variables must be defined, at least informally, when they are first introduced.

This is repeated:

Be careful to define symbols before you use them (or at least to define them very near where you use them).

There are some cases where "the general mathematical community is expected to know what you mean," like when publishing papers in some specialized field, but if you're writing a book, these rules hold quite true. Books certainly should explain their notation, especially since the general consensus for certain notations is expected to change over the decades ...

[1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...

Thanks you for this. That means that in the original wording:

Last month, NASA said it would pay SpaceX its largest single contract ever, $2.6 billion

The word "its" is an ambiguous pronoun - those who read it to mean "NASA" are left confused, since it seems like NASA just went around awarding even larger contracts. In fact, I think it's not only ambiguous, but in the most obvious interpretation of that sentence, it does indeed sound like NASA's biggest single awarded contract ever.

I think it would be a tremendous waste of effort to rewrite Emacs libraries in any language other than Emacs Lisp. Thus, what interests me is the idea of supporting other languages in addition to Emacs Lisp.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00...

Common Lisp is extremely complicated and ugly. When I wrote GNU Emacs I had just finished implementing Common Lisp, and I did not like it much. It would bloat Emacs terribly, and documenting it would be hard too.

Scheme is elegant, and it is a better direction to move in.

Since we have our own Scheme implementation, we should use that one. If it has a serious disadvantage, we should do something about that. There are various things that might be right to do, but simply disregarding it in the case of Emacs cannot be right.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00...

Here's my migration guide from early September, if you're looking for more resources:

http://nathantypanski.com/blog/2014-08-03-a-vim-like-emacs-c...

Bling, who I've linked to in that post, has repeatedly made quality posts about making the transition:

http://bling.github.io/

Upgrades should not require any restarts, and no restarts are required for you to stop being vulnerable - as this only affects newly created bash sessions, not already running ones.

Org-mode for in-class notes, since I'm a student.

Gitit personal wiki for technical information (my blog post: <http://nathantypanski.com/blog/2014-07-09-personal-wiki.html...).

Google Calendar has my schedule, including where I am at any time during the day. It syncs with my phone, laptop, and tablet. While I would prefer something plaintext (like Org-Mode offers) the Android compatibility is not as good.

Google Tasks (integrated with calendar) and Google Keep for on-the-go notes and tasks.

Paper notes in two-column Cornell style in bound notebooks <http://www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool/comments/27l7tx/whats_you....

Yes. IEEE Std. 1003.1 Utility Conventions

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...

This is actually how Docopt happened (Vladimir Keleshev mentioned it in the PyCon UK 2012 talk).

If anyone follows this and happens to like GNU Global/ggtags (I did), there's a Pygments plugin released earlier this year that enables it to use any language that can be parsed by Pygments: https://github.com/yoshizow/global-pygments-plugin

For Arch Linux users, I made a PKGBUILD for it: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/global-pygments-plugin-gi...

The Pygments plugin is really awesome; it should prove useful even for those who don't use Emacs. For example, gtags lets you use vim/Doxygen/bash/less/etc. to access the tags as well.

believe in induction

Does it even make sense for someone to not believe in induction? It's a perfectly valid logical rule.

I think that's what he was pointing out.

He's saying "oh, this person just used meta like it means 'something that is all the rage', which is some strange emergent usage from a gaming subculture. I'd better explain that so it makes any sense at all."

I would imagine most people here know what the word meta actually means, so just saying "this isn't standard usage" is sufficient.