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shearn89

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Lover of music, technology, skiing, and coffee. www.shearn89.com

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+1 from me: smcFanControl is seriously handy if you do any sort of coding on a macbook. Was recently running a genetic algorithm on it and the app allowed me to bump the fan speed up to something ridiculous in order to keep the cpu at a comfortable temperature. I also tend to raise the speed if I'm watching flash video, since that's still ridiculously cpu intensive on a mac...

* goes to read post *

* comments on it on the blog *

* comes to HN and discovers people have already made my comments in the comment thread *

Great minds...

This is clearly a problem: with Rails' approach being 'right from the start', having no protection by default is not the right way to do it. This issue may be well known among the type of people that use github and read HN, but if someone had read about Rails being an awesome framework to make db-driven websites, they might not be aware of such a thing as a "mass assignment vulnerability."

If by adding a line or 2 to the code for generators can stop this, even if it includes a comment saying "Removing this line will do x y z", then I think the rails team could've treated the bug with a little more respect.

As @ericb said, if strong devs make this mistake, there's something wrong with the code.

I think it should also be noted that he didn't do anything malicious like trash repos, and even says on his blog:

    "Then I could wipe any post in any project. That wasn't that funny but pretty
    dangereous[sic]. It got more curious."
All he did was add a 3 line file to the master repo of a project that he was frustrated with. It generated all this attention, and will probably make them rethink the approach...

Finally: big props to the GitHub team for patching their vulnerability in <1hr on a Sunday...

Another useful toolkit for stuff like this (and anything to do with natural language), but only available for python at the moment is the Natural Language Toolkit: http://code.google.com/p/nltk/

It's a very powerfull toolkit, with a lot more functionality than is needed to write an NB classifier, but may be of interest to anyone looking at NLP!

My absolute favourite album to code to would actually be the Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk, but I've also spent the last few years at uni listening to http://www.prettylightsmusic.com/ while I code: his albums are all available for free/donation, and the genre is kind of down-tempo electronic. There's the occaisonal vocal sample, but I've found it doesn't distract me from work.

Endtroducing by DJ Shadow is also worth a listen, as although there's vocals, they're generally calm. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32X-ieCav-M

As @artanis0 (kind of) mentioned, it'd be great to see a HN post sometime soon called "How to write a good 'REST' API". Or even just some links to good tutorials that could get me (and others) started? I've recently built a DB driven site that could possibly be extended with an API, and it's a good chance to learn something with a purpose behind it!

I love the part where he tries to get back on Mike (Krahulik's) better side: "Did I feed into his emails a little bit too much yeah ok . But it’s one person dude for real. No disrespect intended for you , My name is good in this industry and I know a lot of people."

But then goes off on one when Mike posts a slightly glib "take me off this mailing list"!

I agree with FuzzyDunlop, definitely been watching waaay too much Sopranos.

EDIT: The dude seriously needs to learn to punctuate sentences better, some of those could definitely use some commas!

Am I the only person who find this comment (perhaps inadvertantly) amusing? "A small number have been spun back out... but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability."

"Establishing notability"?

These are Pokemon we're talking about right?