dwheeler

46 ms·

541.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Only 2 ports? My Mac has all 4 USB-C ports in use, two of those connect to hubs so I can multiplex them, and I have to unplug something to connect my backup drive because 4 isn't enough. I look forward to a more reasonable number of ex
542.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Fuzzers can find defects, including vulnerabilities, that might be missed by other tools. AFL used a newer technique, called being "coverage guided", that turned out to be a remarkable improvement. As a coverage guided tool it m
543.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I think it is almost certain that a vast amount of human knowledge was lost. The policy of the city of Alexandria was to copy every book that went through it, and give the copy back. As a result, they ended up with a spectacularly large col
544.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I didn't say that. I said: > A lot of their costs are for printing paper, but one of the main draws for paper is that they lock down the PDFs with onerous licensing restrictions so the paper is often far more efficient from a legal
545.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I suspect most of the operations costs come from doing things in their obsolete way. If you eliminated the paywall, there'd be no reason to run a paywall, which imposes substantial costs. A lot of their costs are for printing paper, bu
546.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> Honestly, I don't get why people are complaining. An ISO standard costs fraction of what the developer's time reading said standard costs. That'd be true if there was only one. But real-world systems often involve a vast
547.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Ah, I wish that were true. There are some ISO standards that are not publicly available but still have value. They'd have a lot more value if they were publicly available.
548.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> But let's assume ISO would publish only high-quality standards. Wouldn't those be worth their salt? Paying ISO has nothing to do with creating or distributing the standards. The developers of the standards are, in all cases I
549.
by dwheeler 6y ago
ISO calls standards that are freely available to the public as "publicly available". It's even in the URL for their list: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ So using ISO&#x27
550.
by dwheeler 6y ago
This might be important. Practical FHE would be a big deal. But this is to TRY to make it practical, and that is not the same thing. I wish them luck.
551.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I'm not excited. I think it's very important to have good defaults. But "you can't configure it" means you can't have changes that adjust to the situation. Let's look at a mentioned example: > Increas
552.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I'm so glad the download-entire-wikipedia function continues to exist. That will help counter the "lost the entire library problem" from the city of Alexandria. To be fair, Wikipedia only has summaries, not the detailed mater
553.
by dwheeler 6y ago
The "has to do everything to get funded" is definitely not a new problem, it's structural. "The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results" (January 1, 1983) includes an article by William R. (Randy) Simpson abou
554.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> Seems like if the US govt. can have a policy that disrupts the revolving door, they could also institute a policy that all tenders require the perpetual rights to technical data? Especially if this is a problem that even outsiders are
555.
by dwheeler 6y ago
While the revolving door is always a potential issue, and I'm sure it happens, I don't think that's a key problem for the DoD. When government officials leave office they're required to not do work, for a period of tim
556.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can le
557.
by dwheeler 6y ago
That's an incredibly long time, and there's no reason to assume our technology can't get better in that time (if we are around). Another solution is to move spaceship Earth: https://dwheeler.com/essays/mo
558.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> The problem with metamath is that you basically have to be a fully signed-up masochist in order to do anything nontrivial with it. People have certainly done nontrivial things with it e.g Carneiro and the prime number theorem -- but it
559.
by dwheeler 6y ago
You might check out the gem "fasterer" which warns about n+1 queries.
560.
by dwheeler 6y ago
What's interesting about the main SolarWinds subversion was a build environment subversion. It didn't matter how much source code review was done. To detect/counter this kind of attack you need different measures. Start by ha
561.
by dwheeler 6y ago
An interesting alternative OSS natural language translator is Apertium: https://www.apertium.org/ Their public site doesn't support English/French, though, so it's hard for me to judge it.
562.
by dwheeler 6y ago
This is really cool . I sent it several paragraphs to translate and the results were quite understandable. On a quick check I don't think the quality is as good as Google Translate (currently), but it's pretty darn decent already
563.
by dwheeler 6y ago
To be fair, in earlier times it wasn't clear if software was copyrightable. In the US the Copyright Act of 1976, which became effective on January 1, 1978, clearly stated that Congress intended software to be copyrightable; before that
564.
by dwheeler 6y ago
MIT license history is here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=926... First version 1984, revised version more widely used 1986. I'm sure that software was released in a permissive wray
565.
by dwheeler 6y ago
The problem is that he is playing fast and loose with definitions, and he is also playing fast and loose with history. Copyleft started with GPL version 1, which was its first embodiment. Sharing source code in a permissive way started long
566.
by dwheeler 6y ago
It's hard to take this seriously because it starts with false premises. Both the open source definition (from the open source initiative), which defines open source software, and the free software definition (from the free software fou
567.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I completely agree. If you're directly using a SHA hash for password storage, even with salt, you're doing it so incompetently that you should probably be fined. At the very least use a well-studied iterated salted hash algori
568.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> if your queries are very specific and only return a couple rows, then you can have huge tables and join across them without issue. I agree, if you index your tables. Relational databases are very capable; when there's a performa
569.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> 50% of the top 200 packages were compatible by the end of 2012. Which meant you could not usually convert, since ALL dependenices had to be converted. The chance of doing that successfully then with 300 libraries (including transitive
570.
by dwheeler 6y ago
One problem in understanding computer science history is the essentially perpetual copyright laws. It's illegal to view or share many important past programs' source code, a problem not shared by other fields. Imagine discussing l

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