taway2012

Hopefully the redesign won't give us light gray text on a white background, which seems to the rage these days. :)

I had zero problems reading the print version.

To me, it seems to be the same as the Norvig algorithm, except that only deletes are considered. Which allows them to pre-calculate misspellings with modest storage cost.

Am I mistaken?

How long ago did you buy your house? If a person bought the house today, would they still pay only $640/mo?

Been in a few orgs. I now think "no rewrites" is a good policy for all but a few orgs. Few orgs have the (1) business luxury (time and money) or, (2) the caliber of people and, (3) team motivation (few teams people even want to improve things) to pull off rewrites.

The best orgs do a rewrite usually in the face of sea changes to the technology stack (e.g., containers vs. VMs) or business use (number of users is now 10X of original etc). Bringing key infrastructure in-house is also a decent reason, but the benefit of building expertise in an existing ecosystem vs. full rewrite should be carefully weighed.

You probably have read spolsky's article. It's quite dated by now, but it's still more right than wrong. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I like functions that return a value to be written in the guard-clause style. [In C++, that's probably better for efficiency since the compiler optimizer doesn't have to remove temporaries by converting the code to guard-clause style.]

However, I'm not convinced that void functions are better written in the guard-clause style. I think the intent of the code is better expressed with nested ifs. Of course, try to factor the ifs so that they're readable.

I'm saying this is more readable if the "do something part" is less than about 15 lines. Thoughts?

    void do_something(input) {
      if (!input.already_done()) {
        // do something.
      }
    }

Don't do this. The whole thing gave off a bad smell on first reading so I would never have done this.

Thank you vinkelhake for nailing the the real problem (exceptions) and bothering to check whether the stack overhead really exists.

Just wanted to chime in with a comment because HN doesn't show vote counts, so future readers will "see" my upvote on vinkelhake's comment.

How? How can DRM force me to display the iframe containing an ad.

No story here. No budget provider I've looked at says they will help you withstand a DDoS attack. [Thanks to the commenter who says OVH does, I will look into them closely.]

I did this due diligence for a 10-user app. These guys have no excuse for not planning for a DDoS with a serious business.

Multiple file attachments in entries. I think 1.x only supports one attachment per entry.

Crockford's "Javascript: the Good Parts" is a very good book.

This is probably what the parent meant:

    >>> 'truthy' if None else 'falsy'
    'falsy'
    >>> 'truthy' if False  else 'falsy'
    'falsy'
    >>> 'truthy' if 0 else 'falsy'
    'falsy'

Yeah, I know this is just an Internet forum so who cares what's said right? But ...

But Ask the Korean made an excellent point about culturalism: "The term "culturalism" is my coinage ... is the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined. Because the culturalist impulse always attempts to explain more with culture than warranted, the "cultural difference" used in a cultural explanation is more often imagined than real. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, to a man with a culturalist impulse, every problem looks like a cultural problem."

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-...

FYI most Indians in the US like the more egalitarian, US way of lower "power distance" better.

OK, I see why a downvoter downvoted it. I meant to write:

"Yep, I know why the Mac's text looks blurrier" i.e., I meant to agree with 'coldtea' and add to the discussion.

The way I've written it now makes it sound like I'm disagreeing. Anyway, the link above should be useful to future readers.

Yep, I know the Mac's text looks blurrier:

Link for anybody else interested: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... (linked articles are good too)

what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

In my case it's Lightroom. :)

Longtime Ubuntu user here. Bought a Mac mini as my desktop replacement on the off-chance that I might write an iOS app.

I'm actually running Ubuntu inside Mac as my development environment. Ubuntu also nicely solves the "blurry text" problem [flame away! :)]

Sort of off-topic question. :)

Is it still the case that updates from Apple will randomly break a Hackintosh? It used to be the case a few years ago. Has it gotten easier to update a Hackintosh these days?

Thanks for the response. I get the A+ site when I directly visit via IP.

I went through the delta between the reports with a fine-toothed comb and discovered that SNI wasn't the problem. It was a biggie: looks like HSTS wasn't enabled for visits to the static part of the site (like the homepage).

It seems like Nginx is doing something counter-intuitive. I've set HSTS at the server level using the 'add_header' directive.

I've set 'max-age=0, must-revalidate' at the location level using add_header for the static parts of my site. I expected Nginx to add both add_headers, but it only seems to do the "deepest" set of add_headers it finds.

Duplicating the 'add_header' directive at the location level (resulting in two add_header directives) results in HSTS being sent for the static parts also.

Now I get A+ on SSL Labs for both sites.

I host two sites on the same IP. The first site declared in my nginx conf file got A+. The second one got A with a note that it doesn't work in browsers without SNI.

Identical SSL configurations otherwise.

Is this expected? Or am I doing something wrong?

everything-is-string semantics make programming an exercise in quoting.

Is your code filled with literal strings? Otherwise why your code be "an exercise in quoting"?

re Python: Remember that EDA tools aren't libraries, they're actual command line program programs. So those tools will still need a command line language. Python is horribly unsuited as a command line language, so the tool will probably continue to have Tcl to present the text user interface.

So you'll then end up with two interpreters in the same tool. Hardly a desirable state of affairs. So yeah, I think the ROI of embedding Python in EDA tools is probably not doing to be worth it.

A lot of the C code backing the Tcl APIs directly build Tcl objects or store pointers to Tcl objects in C. It will be giant task to make those APIs work correctly with Python also.

This is a relatively obscure feature of Tcl, but it has some great ideas on how to safely execute user-supplied scripts in a sandbox.

Pretty cool.

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/interp.htm

Base64 can maybe result in strings unsuitable for pasting as-is into bad HTTP servers' URLs (the default character set include '/' and '+').

Using only the uppercase letters lets them worry less about whether the string got mangled because some systems interpreted it as Unicode and some didn't etc.

Something like Bitcoin and Flickr's base58 would have also worked, but the encoder and decoder would have been more complicated. They got away with only division by 16.

They get a little bit of integrity checking too.

Basically, this is base16 with a poor man's integrity checking baked in. Pretty interesting.

Fair enough. I now see that speed limits are set differently in different parts of the US. My driving has been mostly in the western and southwestern states.

It causes the speed limit on a majority of roads to be set to a level that is well below a safe speed to drive, instead of setting reasonable limits in most places and then carving out exceptions in places that are more dangerous.

OK, I'll bite.

I'm assuming you're talking about the US. Do you really think that a "majority" are set to a level "well below" a "safe speed"?

You think 25 mph on a residential street is too low? There's a British video of how even low-speed collisions can be fatal for pedestrians.

I've personally found the speeds in the USA to be eminently reasonable. 25 mph: residental, 30 mph on undivided business streets, 40/45 for multilane main streets. 50 mph for minor highways, and 65+ for interstates and major highways.

Interesting. Even compared to the hallowed Thinkpad?

"Practical Cryptography" is a good book.

Hmm, you think noisy drones flying around delivering packages within 30 minutes of ordering is a more concrete vision than a robot walking up to your door from a self-driving car? (last 30 ft problem).

I can easily imagine myself solving this problem in about 2 years if given access to Google street view data. Remember, Google probably has detailed (centimeter resolution) 3D maps of from their street view cars (they use LIDAR, afaik).

The Google plan is much more realistic than Amazon's announcement. IMHO. YMMV. I am not a robotics person etc.

Couple questions.

1) AFAIK, bitcoin has "comments" within transactions. Why not embed the checksum as a comment in a transaction between wallets you control?

2) In the approach described here, no coins are being sent with the transaction (right?). Are blockchain participants really accepting NOP transactions involving 0 BTC transfers. Maybe I missed something.

3) As others pointed out, requiring the whole file to be uploaded is a non-starter for anybody savvy enough to be using this service. Users should be able to directly specify the checksum.

I suspect this is a HMAC-SHA1 similar to what the blog author surmised. It's possibly a response to the recent fiasco where they misrouted IMs.

I think they use this signature in their backend as a last defense when routing a message to a recipient. Being meant for the backend explains why messages with corrupt signatures are accepted (the backend notices that incoming signature is bad, so it doesn't use the signature to check the message when routing).

2) I'm curious about what people who say "crytpo in the browser/JS is bad" think about this. This seems to be a pretty good application of crypto to achieve a very narrow goal.

Pretty interesting nugget there. I've always thought Amazon cloud services were overpriced. But I thought maybe the software engineering labor is expensive. The comment that "software engineering costs rounds down to zero" was extra information I didn't have that strengthens my gut feeling.

Just my two cents. I don't expect to change anybody's mind. :)

Yeah, I think this is probably going to work. Thx!

PS: 'inevitable', you made the same suggestion. But you seem to be hellbanned.