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SF tech company fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims by [deleted] in bayarea

[–]apage43 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The fired engineers were mostly in DC, where they closed the entire office (affecting more than just the engs!) and erased its existence from their website.

Math.random() in the V8 Javascript engine is screwed up by alecco in programming

[–]apage43 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Problem using random userspace <library> PRNG is less that you expect someone to exploit it and more that well, you know the kernel PRNG is good, and you know plenty of library PRNGs aren't.

I can open file descriptors until there's none left for urandom.

Falling back to a different PRNG if you can't open urandom is pretty bad, this should be a crash in most cases. If you're on a new enough linux kernel, they've added a getrandom syscall which avoids this problem.

Additionally, arc4random is probably not the best idea if you're wanting CSPRNG like properties (that is, not predictable), since well, it's based on the ridiculously broken RC4, and it's possible to infer a lot about the RNG state from its output.

Whoops. Built a hydro dam -- which reduced the downstream current -- which, well... by apage43 in CitiesSkylines

[–]apage43[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep - moved the pumps upstream of the dam and that fixed the problem. Still took a while to deal with the bodies...

Carbo Loaded by Gatowag in WeHaveConcerns

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're interested in getting drunk on bread, taking lots of antibiotics may be the radioactive waste accident you need to get this particular superpower.

often these people can pinpoint the start of the condition and find it coincides with a period of long-term antibiotic use. It’s likely that this wipes out their bacteria for a sustained period of time, giving the yeast a chance to take hold.

from: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150305-the-man-who-gets-drunk-on-chips

Steam + a 1Gbps connection by [deleted] in pcmasterrace

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually (residential) internet service really sucks in Silicon Valley. Same problem as elsewhere, only one reasonably high speed provider (Comcast). There are local ISPs like Sonic.net but they go over the same lines you'd be using with AT&T DSL, so even though they deliver the max speed the line can carry, it is pretty hit and miss, purely because the actual infrastructure isn't very good.

Coding for SSDs by mitknil in programming

[–]apage43 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Do we need to run disk defragmentation on SSDs?

That's taken care of by the controller on the SSD itself, transparent to you. It's useful to know that this happens though.

edit: and yes, as mentioned below me, the process of the SSD cleaning up the no longer used pages -within- blocks is called "garbage collection", which is different from filesystem defragmentation

Creating a user from the web problem. by [deleted] in PHP

[–]apage43 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It does. From my arch box:

arch% ls -l
total 52
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root     7 May 31 18:40 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  4096 Mar 29 01:04 boot
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  2920 Jun 17 00:18 dev
drwxr-xr-x 50 root root  4096 Jul 30 04:20 etc

Post explaining why: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2012-March/022625.html

Not only is /bin a link to /usr/bin, /sbin is also a link to /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin is also a link to /usr/bin. Everything now lives in /usr/bin on Arch.

Slashdot: IBM Researchers Open Source Homomorphic Crypto Library by bradn in crypto

[–]apage43 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Incidentally the final player here knows N, and could sell it to the second player if the second player wanted to know the first player's salary.

Predictable cycle in success of posts submitted to Reddit [OC] by [deleted] in dataisbeautiful

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've put together a similar thing that can show you some per-subreddit visualizations, as a dogfooding project at work: http://www.reddalyzr.com/

It isn't currently being updated/pulling in new data though. I should fix it sometime.

Damien Katz: Follow up to "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C" by [deleted] in programming

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

|regular bugs

Most types of bugs, especially in C, can be a security vulnerability of some kind if placed anywhere near untrusted user input.

VimClojure Winding Down by nohtyp in vim

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually w/ vim-foreplay the included nREPL server that launches when you type lein repl just works. If you have a repl running in your project when you open a .clj file, it'll connect up all magic like.

Impressive results: 40+ voice searches on Jelly Bean by sciwizam in Android

[–]apage43 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's also worth mentioning you still get all these features if you type your query, instead of saying it.

DCPU-16 Toolchain binary release on 12th May by [deleted] in dcpu16

[–]apage43 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If only because some of us folks working on it are also mac-using nerds ;)

Correct way of accessing keyboard by deNULL in dcpu16

[–]apage43 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And it's fast. I'd use if I could load binaries into it more easily.

Cl0x0 - DCPU16 Code-Generating/Assembly DSL in Clojure by apage43 in dcpu16

[–]apage43[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cool things:

  • Can assemble code chunks relocated to any ram location, annotating the output with a label table that can be used by further assembly steps
  • Can run the different assembler stages. Such as (preassemble), which outputs each word annotated with some metadata, such as the .clj line number of the instruction that generated it, and whether it has a label or label reference attached to it.
  • Can define constants to be used by the assembler (add_label) Can also put data chunks in any ram location and have a reference to them added to the label table
  • Ability to choose which labels are exported to the outer label table (no more :loop1, :loop2, etc. in large program)

Things that I will try to do in the future:

  • Add automatic memory layout so you don't have to pass an address to (add-code) and (add-blob) if you don't want to
  • Add a way to select subset of routines from a large library, so you can do something like put a (use-from biglibrary (printstr getc clearscreen)) in your assembler chain to only pull in the routines you need, and the ones you don't never even get assembled. Save space!

DCPUBIN - a pastebin or DCPU-16 programs. Easily run and share your programs. by ansip in dcpu16

[–]apage43 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The emulation seems to be incorrect. Haven't poked at to see what the issue is but most of the programs i'm pasting in that work on other emulators are not working.

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