alexjeffrey

4 ms·

1.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
in my experience, if you can grab a couple of not-too-underpriced gigs on a freelancing website (my preference is PeoplePerHour as it's less price-war-y) and can get a few regular clients from that, they'll be more happy to pay a
2.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator would be nice, too.
3.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
no problem at all - thanks for all the hard work you put into the book!
4.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
for anyone else wanting to read Elon Musk's story in more depth, I can't recommend "The Engineer" by Erik Nordeus enough. He basically compiled titbits of information from various interviews and articles and reconstructe
5.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
white privilege? don't you mean anglocentricism? the bias would be equally present if Mark was African-American or Asian-American.
6.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
we still are - plenty of startups don't even start making money before they're acquired.
7.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
truly the most hipster art project of all time. I'd back it!
8.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
... and it's impossible to know for sure that a hash is secure against collisions. For example, MD5 was the standard for hashing for quite some time but is considered broken today due to attacks that have since been discovered. By impl
9.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
realistically you would want to use a merkle tree to hash the source, to make it more secure against a chosen plaintext collision, but aside from that this'd be a great addition.
10.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
it should also be mentioned that Jerry's commentary is _hilarious_ - he's basically the SeaNanners of chess.
11.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
but with all the publicity surrounding their actions, will they become more well known which will in fact counteract their star rating on Yelp? My guess is yes.
12.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
you say that, but minecraft is worth actual money because it sells a product that lots of people want to buy and has a lot of potential for further attached products (servers, DLC, etc). A more apt comparison would be whatsapp/instagra
13.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
that's just PR - PR companies wouldn't do so well if they pushed stories that showed their clients in a negative light.
14.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
these figures are deceptive considering the UK's comparatively-socialist tax attitude. The biggest thing I would point out is that we have nationalised free healthcare for everyone, which takes a big bite out of PPP but also means that
15.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
I think black triangles are only really possible if you're working on software architecture - that bit when you "go into the tunnel" and are working in purely abstract space comes with such a payoff once you reach your projec
16.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
I'm not the parent (I'm GP), but my position is that organic certification is good, but the universal association of "natural = good, synthetic = bad" is only harmful. Yes, farmers pump animals full of chemicals and this
17.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
more importantly, the use of "natural" to describe a product with the implication that it being synthetic would be a bad thing is a fallacy.
18.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
your assumptions about cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators (CSPRNGs for short) are incorrect - one of the key requirements of secure random number generation is the inability to predict future state given previous state.
19.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
uplink is fun, and considered a classic of the genre. In terms of education, the real thing is more interesting - check out places like hackthissite.org or smashthestack.org for some real life (ish) hacking in a contained environment. Hold
20.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
I agree, but the race condition kind of kills it - 2 people editing the same file at the same time.
21.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
looks like fun! I've been holding out for a modern retake on the uplink series or some other fun hacking game. one UI thing that came up for me - going through the university pages, it wasn't totally clear that the green buttons w
22.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
There's a term for this exact phenomenon - Little Eichmann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns This ties into the concept of the "Banality of evil" which plays out pretty much exactly as you d
23.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
I chose the languages above mainly due to their popularity outside the sphere of silicon valley - you are right that I should have included python in this list, but go and haskell are still only popular in a very restricted audience and I m
24.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
but on the other hand, it is better than having unknown security properties like e.g. ruby or javascript on node.js. While node is built on the venerable V8 engine which has strong security roots, its core libraries and dependencies are les
25.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
what would you suggest? for all its faults, PHP has seen a lot of hardening efforts over its lifetime and its security flaws are well known and can be compensated for.
26.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
in my mind, the first email would be encrypted using a public address obtained by asking for the key from the receiver's domain's server, or otherwise leveraging the DNS for the receiver's mailserver.
27.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
having everything come back to money is a good thing though - a user can afford to pay e.g. 1 microdollar per email sent but if a spammer is sending 10 million emails a day, they can't afford that level of operational expense.
28.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
I know I'm going to get called on Godwin's law and/or hyperbole for this one, but this is the exact route Hitler took (using the Reichstag fire) to escalate his authority from Chancellor to Fuhrer. [edit] to clarify, the reas
29.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
you make a number of good points, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that autoimmune problems stop with allergies - there are much more unpleasant conditions (like Crohn's disease) that are linked with the same immune system
30.
by alexjeffrey 12y ago
a lot of the opening of chess is playing memorized counters to different plays that have been extensively studied - you could fill a library with books dedicated to chess openings, explaining why a particular move is good against another.

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