alex-'s comments

alex- | 3 years ago | on: What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained

Yes, a secret key like this could have made this breach much less concerning. Assuming you trust the company to not also lose this data (that they generate and claim to not store). What I was really hoping to find was a paid, cross platform, cloud sync'ed solution that can be setup to require your password and physical key to decrypt. i.e. have 2FA protection from a data breach like this.

alex- | 3 years ago | on: What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained

I initially assumed I would be safe because of 2FA. Sadly it looks like this is not the case, the second factor is used to access the encrypted data, not decrypt the data. As the attacker already has the encrypted data, they have bypassed the stage where 2FA is providing protection. This appears to also be the case for 1password and bitwarden, so not specifically a lastpass failure.

alex- | 3 years ago | on: It’s Time for ‘Maximum Viable Product’

This makes me think of something Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

alex- | 6 years ago | on: Google bans apps that facilitate sale of marijuana

My guess is it's less about a moral issue with marijuana and more about a fear of upsetting people displaying the adds. Many of whom won't want to be associated with something federally illegal. The alternative headline being "Google displays illegal drug adds on school site" (or some other page that probably should not be showing ads)

alex- | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: As a programmer, how do you know if you're a good one or not?

If your employer is happy with your performance then you are probably "good enough" as you say.

However if you truly do always want to be improving your ability as a software engineer, then you are in luck, this field is so vast and deep that you can easily spend more than a lifetime improving! Finding out how and measuring it is another matter.

alex- | 7 years ago | on: Asterisks in Python

My favorite unpacking snippet is rotating a matrix

>>> matrix = [(1,2,3),(4,5,6),(7,8,9)]

>>> list(zip(*matrix))

[(1, 4, 7), (2, 5, 8), (3, 6, 9)]

Not as readable as a real maths library, but pretty cool and educational.

Think I came across it in Python in a nut shell, by Alex Martelli

Edit: formatting

alex- | 8 years ago | on: Project from Hell (2008)

> given the abysmal quality of this thing, nobody will ever insist that they release the sources

I am interested in seeing the source :)

alex- | 8 years ago | on: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

I think most people, at some level, know this and accept it. I think the shock comes when you think how long this information is kept for, and what that means. i.e. each year they can advertise age appropriate birthday presents, a few years from now they might get adverts for children party suppliers. As they grow up college saving funds, colleges, trips to Disney land, first cars can all be targeted to you at just the right time.

alex- | 8 years ago | on: The Effective Tech Lead Is a 100x Engineer

I also agree that it is not a helpful term.

I like to think we are all 10x developers. The question of a 1x developer should be how to grow their productivity (assuming they are motivated to do so). Less productive developers should not feel like they have one tenth of the natural talent someone else has. Instead they should look at how they can improve their work flow/knowledge and companies should try and maximise the output of their employees.

Yes some people will always be better/more productive than others, but most people are differentiated by completely controllable factors.

alex- | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

I try and mitigate the password management single point of failure with two factor authentication.

Obviously that it not an option for every site but access to my password manager, alone, will not provide access to my email (which lets me rest all my accounts) or my bank etc

Of course I use two factor on the manager too.

It doesn't completely solve the problem but I haven't found a better alternative (that works for me)

alex- | 8 years ago | on: How do Ruby and Python profilers work?

It might be interesting to some to know that relatively recently (2016) PEP 523 ( https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0523/ ) was created which provides a more efficient alternative to PyEval_SetTrace or PyEval_SetProfile for some use cases.

The idea of this PEP is to add frame evaluation into cPython. As the PEP says "For instance, it would not be difficult to implement a tracing or profiling function at the call level with this API"

Elizaveta Shashkova (a PyCharm developer at JetBrains) gave a really good talk on the subject at this years PyCon ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdObDUbLjdg ).

alex- | 8 years ago | on: Optimized Python Docker Image

This was just mentioned today at north bay python.

Another alternative for a fast speed up by changing your base image is trying out the pypy images.

alex- | 8 years ago | on: Google Releases Colaboratory

Looks like it defaults to providing a python2 2.7.12 environment.

I don't see anyway of selecting python3, any one found the option? Or are they only supporting Python2?

alex- | 8 years ago | on: US won't punish United Airlines over passenger-dragging incident

This to me seems like the major point. If we imagine we own a restaurant and a customer refused to leave, forcing us to call the police. Then the police show up, over react and shoot the customer. Surely the law enforcers doing the shooting are the responsible/guilty party?
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