KMag

91 ms·

781.
by KMag 5y ago
I went to MIT 20 years ago. Plenty of people smarter than me failed out. MIT seems to do a pretty good job of screening out people who won't pick up the material fast enough. In my experience, the ones who failed out were the ones w
782.
by KMag 5y ago
That's not quite what I'm talking about. If you look at Gries's 2006 paper (the less formal one, not his formal proof of the algorithm), each node has 2 bits for state and two child pointers. State 0: Node is white St
783.
by KMag 5y ago
Now, that's the beginning of a good argument! If I'm arguing that the noble lie is morally good (I didn't say as much, but I think it's fair to read my statements as moral agreement), presumably I'm arguing in favor
784.
by KMag 5y ago
Very good points.
785.
by KMag 5y ago
Aha... it seems I've been lied to! It seems the proof of correctness is for a binary graph (each node has an out-degree of at most 2, but cycles are allowed in the graph) and needs 2 extra bits of state per node. [0][1] Now, one can r
786.
by KMag 5y ago
> ... an additional person potentially screwed up just because the dead person believed a myth ... The police and the loved ones will presumably both be emotionally better off if the person believes the myth, because the myth reduces sui
787.
by KMag 5y ago
I agree with your first point, but it's orthogonal to the question if people who would commit suicide given enough money goes to their loved ones should be tricked into not committing suicide. And, as far as the utility argument is co
788.
by KMag 5y ago
"Life insurance won't pay out if you commit suicide" sounds like a common misconception/noble lie worth perpetuating. On the one hand, I'm generally in favor of trusting people to make the right decisions for themse
789.
by KMag 5y ago
I think the GP is speculating that the perp was in a position to nearly force the police to mortally wound him. Given they had already shot him once, presumably waving a gun in their direction would have drawn a mortal wound.
790.
by KMag 5y ago
Everyone likes to bikeshed, but I'm a bit disappointed that TLS 1.3 kept the ability to use pre-shared-keys without (EC)DHE. I get that the intended use case is not paying the overhead of asymmetric crypto for embedded applications. H
791.
by KMag 5y ago
Remember those early Sun optical mice that required you to use them on a special mouse pad that had a high-contrast pattern on it for the mouse to track? I'm a bit sad that I recycled my (freeby, thank you reuse@mit.edu) SGI Indy when
792.
by KMag 5y ago
I would love to write a small program (maybe called ThrowbackFriday) that on Friday afternoon would kill my X11 window manager and randomly select a window manager popular in the late 90s, or a wm emulating the Win95 look and feel. It shou
793.
by KMag 5y ago
The day we turned on our CAPTCHA, I also remember being horrified at the number of people likely running LimeWire on US Navy vessels. One IP address in the DC metro area had multiple purchases per minute, with half of the email addresses e
794.
by KMag 5y ago
I think we all cargo-cult our way into programming and then over decades get better and better understanding of what we're doing and why. I remember being 7 years old and not really understanding the AppleSoft BASIC manual. I memorize
795.
by KMag 5y ago
At my previous job, one of the nicest bits of kit was the moribund code logging system. You put a function call into the moribund logging library from a bit of code you thought was unused. The first time a process hit that line of code, i
796.
by KMag 5y ago
Oops. You're right. "The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management" by Richard Jones, et al., CRC Press, 2012.
797.
by KMag 5y ago
Yea, the incentives in the wrong place for credit card processors. They actually charge credit processing fees for fraudulent purchases, and then get to charge processing fees again for the chargeback when the fraud is discovered, even tho
798.
by KMag 5y ago
If you're interested in this sort of thing "The Art of Garbage Collection" is the standard go-to text these days. It's been a little while, but as I remember, the main reason for pointer reversing is to be able to not us
799.
by KMag 5y ago
I think it's wise to minimize the number of synchronous reads necessary for correct operation. Pervasive usage of immutable data and (expiring) cryptographic capability tokens makes this much easier. Typically, the use of immutable d
800.
by KMag 5y ago
We may never need to replace AES 256, but Grover's quantum search algorithm can break AES 128 with a work factor of 2^64. AES 256 GCM and a post-quantum authenticated key agreement algorithm may be all we ever need.
801.
by KMag 5y ago
A pregnancy doesn't show up on a pregnancy test (a read operation) until after implantation and enough fetal growth to significantly impact the mother's hormone levels. So, there was a write (fertilization) followed by a read (pr
802.
by KMag 5y ago
Somehow, I just assumed that because git is based on content-addressed storage DAG that GitHub internally heavily leveraged a distributed hash table and content-addressed storage DAG. With content-addressed storage, all of the stored data
803.
by KMag 5y ago
To be fair, financial symbology is its own hellish rabbit hole. $prevjob is probably a symbol in someone's pet obscure symbology schema for some stock I've never heard of traded in a country I don't even know exists. Most NA
804.
by KMag 5y ago
They're using shell variable replacement syntax to refer to their previous job, without naming their previous employer.
805.
by KMag 5y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contractum_trinius . There are lots of ways to slice and dice cash flows and quibble over what's interest and what isn't. (See also repurchase agreements, Islamic finance,
806.
by KMag 5y ago
Presumably they mean that the total amount paid is not affected by the timing of payments. If they make a lot of money and pay it all off the first year, they pay the same total number of dollars as if they are unemployed for 4 years and m
807.
by KMag 5y ago
> There are no friends in the spy game; this should have become abundantly clear after the revelations on US tapping the German chancellor as a matter of routine. Even in the late 1990s, the public learned the FVEY countries had explicit
808.
by KMag 5y ago
It's unfortunate that more architectures aren't implemented with something like DEC Alpha's PALCode, where the CPU's firmware is essentially a single-tenant hypervisor. The OS kernel proper uses upcalls to the firmware
809.
by KMag 5y ago
Note that some algorithms (Rivest's time lock puzzles[0] come to mind) don't have obvious equivalents for elliptic curves, so it's still important to be able to generate good RSA keys. [0] https://people.csail.mit.e
810.
by KMag 5y ago
It's possible a lack of sleep reduced his immune response to the cancer. The body has some natural cancer fighting mechanisms, and it's only the mutations that escape these that become malignant tumors.

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