funciton's comments

funciton | 7 months ago | on: Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

You want to be authenticated specifically on the device that you're using to access the website. Not some arbitrary other device.

If you enter your username, password, and totp, and the website tells you you've logged in from some device halfway across the planet you've never heard of, you probably have a problem.

funciton | 1 year ago | on: AI is not a Net Positive for Society

The city is polluted. Do we replace the entire city or install air filters? It's mostly a matter of scale.

funciton | 1 year ago | on: AI is not a Net Positive for Society

I find it a bit strange to make a blanket statement like that, dismissing an entire field of research as 'not a net positive'.

funciton | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: How bad is the xz hack?

Who's going to be on the hook for ID verification? Ah, right... Just a thought, making open source maintainers do more unpaid work is probably not the answer to the problem of overworked open source maintainers.

funciton | 2 years ago | on: Reddit App – Suspicious high number of recent 5 star, one word reviews

$300 million of that was raised against a $3 billion valuation, and another $700 million against a $10 billion valuation. All in all fairly little dilution for Conde Nast / Advance Publications.

funciton | 2 years ago | on: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

Reddit admins only have site-wide rules to worry about. They don't need to care about whether a particular post is appropriate for a particular subreddit. If they did that would make their job a lot more complicated.

funciton | 3 years ago | on: ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI

Unless you want to be using tor all day every day, and never make an online purchase or log in on a website ever again, there's really no way to stop companies from tracking you. The only way to make that happen is if a regulatory authority forces them to. That's why the GDPR exists.

funciton | 6 years ago | on: Illusions of Sound Perception

The missing fundamental illusion persists when the harmonics are split across different ears, and whether it is perceived or not is highly subjective.

That's why it's widely accepted to be an illusion that arises in the brain's auditory center.

funciton | 6 years ago | on: Google Calendar Event Injection with MailSniper (2017)

Friends and family, sure. But why should a random stranger who has never contacted me before be able to place events in my calendar without my consent? Why is that even the default behavior?

The easy fix would just be to change the default behavior to not showing invites from unknown addresses.

funciton | 7 years ago | on: Janet – A dynamic language and bytecode VM

Haskell, Idris

funciton | 7 years ago | on: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)

> I much prefer the simple NULL sentinel that blows up like an assertion when I made a mistake.

Haskell, for instance, has the 'fromJust :: Maybe A -> A' function that allows you to do just that. It unpacks the Maybe typed value and throws a runtime error if it fails.