HN user
Yeah, they have to because of how they work. As much as possible they do via SAML, and for that no plaintext is needed. But a lot of their customers want to log in to sites that don't support SAML (it's hard). For those they do form stuffing - naturally that requires plaintext.
Source: worked in the industry at a more security-focused company, had to explain to sales/support a few times why they can support a site but we can't.
It's the same. TextSecure called it "Axolotl", but the "Signal protocol" appears to just be a branding change.
Sometimes you do it because the compiler insists a case (that really can never happen) needs to be handled.
It happens a lot to me in Rust and Go.
ThreadPool would lock the GIL, wouldn't it? I think multiprocessing.Pool uses processes and that's where you can avoid the GIL (each process gets its own) at the cost of making data sharing harder.
Even with the GIL, ThreadPools are still fine performance-wise for tasks that release the GIL such as I/O or a number of functions in numpy and scipy.