brl

17 ms·

121.
by brl 17y ago
There is a sweet spot I think between the introduction of cheap personal computers (Apple II, Commodore, TRS-80, etc) and the wide availability of the internet starting in the mid 90s. In the 80s and early 90s, affordable computers existed
122.
by brl 17y ago
Young developers can be, and often are, highly productive but software development is more nuanced than just raw lines of code. Sensible design is both very difficult and very important and I don't think anybody gets very good at it with l
123.
by brl 17y ago
I have never borrowed a book from a library and then later bought the same book. On the other hand, some of the pirated ebooks in my collection have turned out to be valuable enough to sell me on the convenience of owning a physical copy.
124.
by brl 17y ago
Is that really important? It seems that the relevant observation here is that just like piracy, libraries reduce opportunities for authors to receive compensation for their work.
125.
by brl 17y ago
I don't agree that there is a moral dimension to this debate. As you mention, it's an economic question about optimizing the production of valuable creative works in our society through incentives to authors. This needs to be balanced wit
126.
by brl 17y ago
If you believe that author entitlement trumps the social benefit of distributing books to everybody whether or not they can afford to buy them, then why aren't you advocating closing down all the libraries?
127.
by brl 17y ago
As somebody who has never regretted dropping out in high school I find this whole conversation pretty amusing.
128.
by brl 17y ago
Wow, I haven't seen a <blink> tag in the wild since last century. I stopped reading right about there.
129.
by brl 17y ago
You should almost never use implementation inheritance. In fact, until you have mastered designing with composition, the 'extends' keyword should be banned from your vocabulary.
130.
by brl 17y ago
Did they have a viable business to begin with? At least personally, I don't spend too much time worrying that hackers are going to raid my gmail.
131.
by brl 17y ago
Especially since modern compilers will warn about the problem you are trying to prevent by putting the constant on the left side.
132.
by brl 17y ago
> hash=<sha256-of-key-with-data> Oops, you invented your own keyed MAC and now I can append any data I want.
133.
by brl 17y ago
> Until we developers have books that better elucidate the pitfalls of implementation, or better libraries that avoid the pitfalls on our behalf, we'll be stuck "building crypto", somewhat blindly. There are a lot of really good books a
134.
by brl 17y ago
I looked it up and I'm wrong. Copying an array is implemented with native memmove() but comparing two arrays really is done one element at a time.
135.
by brl 17y ago
I've never programmed in C# with Visual Studio but I have no trouble believing that what you are saying is absolutely true. For the last two years I've been programming exclusively in Java inside Eclipse and the experience is far better tha
136.
by brl 17y ago
I'm skeptical that this attack would work against the Java implementation. Surely a language which rivals C for performance does not compare arrays of primitives one byte at a time? I've thought about locally attacking Unix password authen
137.
by brl 17y ago
I think that plenty of people feel confident rolling RSA or DH into a protocol design precisely because they do understand the math. The structure of both algorithms is very simple (In the case of DH maybe even trivial), but if you don't
138.
by brl 17y ago
That demo video blew my mind so much that I'm having trouble processing all the implications of what I just saw.
139.
by brl 17y ago
This link from the article is a lot more interesting than the article itself: http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/
140.
by brl 17y ago
Yes I would agree as most of the advice in the book is more common sense than groundbreaking. When I got to the part about not telling people "You're wrong" and directly criticizing mistakes I didn't need to be convinced. Rather I immedia
141.
by brl 17y ago
The Berne Convention is much too old to specifically address the bare licenses used for open-source software. However one of the provisions of the convention is that any creative work is protected under copyright law without requiring expl
142.
by brl 17y ago
> Everyone knows that you should “Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.” Not everybody knows this. I learned it by reading the book.
143.
What open source could learn from proprietary platforms(news.cnet.com)
1 points by brl 17y ago|0 comments
144.
by brl 17y ago
As it baffles me that you believe the opposite.
145.
by brl 17y ago
Suit yourself, but the price of gold will go wherever the powers that be want it to go.
146.
by brl 17y ago
Do you think that US treasury bills are not a relatively safe investment? That would be quite a controversial thing to say.
147.
by brl 17y ago
If you liked this, you should check out Underground by Suelette Dreyfus. It's by far the best book about hackers ever written. Edit: Oops, already mentioned in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621273
148.
by brl 17y ago
Oh cool, I loved this community collaboration book editing idea when Real World Haskell used it.
149.
Why the free software community cares about The Pirate Bay(news.northxsouth.com)
18 points by brl 17y ago|37 comments
150.
by brl 17y ago
@bleidl

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