thelucky41's comments

If the next town over does not follow this strategy, you will quickly find yourself in a diminished community with less public services and available jobs.

Consumer electronics are becoming more durable. Where once I might have replaced a cell phone every year and my home router every two, I now have had the same phone for four years and my router for six. Second hand sellers and repair shops need the factory reset feature, but we all benefited when our firmware allowed the devices to become safely transferable and repairable.

From the cited paper, most of the acquired devices were not even reset:

> Not reset devices: A surprising number of devices (61% ) were not reset by the previous owners. Due to the setup of our experiment, we had no possibility of asking the previous owners any questions.

I'm doubtful this exists, but I'd like it if it were possible to perform a factory reset or account transfer completely online, and other features around improving the security in the resale market.

For those curious like me how the wifi password was actually leaked:

> WPA-supplicant is responsible for connecting to configured access points after provisioning. We found that it creates its con- figuration files on the user data partition in the folder “misc/wifi/”. Here the file “wpa_supplicant.conf ” contains the Wi-Fi credentials, such as the SSID and PSK.

> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.

Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.

This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?

Peer-to-peer routing is challenging because you aren't sure where to send your data to reach your peer, even if you know their cryptographic public key and address. It's hard because the network physically is splayed out in a big hub-and-spoke tree. A node might know who it's physical neighbors are, but does not necessarily know much about there locations of any of its peers.

If a router receives a peer-to-peer packet, where should it send this packet? With pinecone, this is answered by looking at a cheatsheet, where each node is assigned a specific virtual neighbor that they are in charge of finding among the physical routing tree. This cheatsheet is generated by connecting neighbors who are ordered by their cryptographic public keys.

As peers find routes to their neighbors, they are also discovering routes to other nodes along the chain, helping speed up the entire process of deciding where to send packets.

My Take is that they circumvented the existing protection against brute forcing. The iPhone does this by implementing a countdown timer that prevents trying more than a few passcodes before the time between tries becomes unreasonable. If you can speed up the clock, then you can cut down on the timer. There may be other methods to shorten the time as well.

Chrome and firefox both store saved passwords in plain-text in easily accessible local databases. Don't rely on them to keep passwords safe. I have no experience with IE's password locker.

Let's not forget Dwarf Fortress, which has several mechanisms that are accidentally turing complete. My favorite is the logic gate using animal behavior.

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Computing

The benefit of this comparison is not that the languages have nearly identical performance, but that OCaml can be briefer while accomplishing the same task, with 47% less lines of code.

Saying nothing about comparing LOC in an imperative/OO language to a functional one, does the brevity actually help a reader's understanding of the code at all? It seems to me that a lot of the comparisons call out descriptions of explicit actions in C++ where OCaml does the same action implicitly.

That seems like a language trade-off more than a feature.

Being able to compile assembly directly into a C program is a very useful tool for allowing optimizations across embedded assembly. One way around it is use of intrinsics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_function which is basically what we're talking about.

That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is many times that of their colleagues.

The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what generates these "10x" programmers.

I dream of one day becoming a test pilot. Especially in ships during their developmental stages, unaccounted for situations will come up, and a human capable of assessing and managing these situations are necessary.

For each of the technologies involved with the X-37, et al., that technology required testing with a human-in-the-loop to act as the judge for if the control output made sense. It simply isn't feasible to begin testing your robot pilot without first testing it with a pilot there in the first place.

Thanks! I'll suggest this to the FBO I fly out of as well.

It's a feature, not a bug.

In the past century, the average retirement age has been steadily decreasing up until very recently when it began going up again[1]. People spend more time in school earlier, but education usually leads to working later in life as well[2].

[1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1992/07/art3full.pdf [2] http://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IB_11-11-508.pd...

I'm using this wonderful operating system for my own sideproject for LED juggling props.

Aside from the strong hardware support and large community behind it, Thingsquare has recently released it's slides from their training classes on Contiki that give an excellent overview. Porting an already existing platform to my own custom hardware has been relatively painless compared to Linux or an RTOS, though it is difficult to make Contiki's makefile based workflow work well in an IDE.

Cooperative protothreads are surprisingly easy to work with, and the IP/mesh networking stack is highly configurable at each layer. Combined with an excellent overall code quality, this is the very first open-source project I've ever really wanted to get involved in.

According to Thingsquare, Tado is using their firmware [1], Mist, based off of the open source Contiki [2]. This is pretty cool, as it enables a ton of features like over the air firmware updates or running your own applications. I'm especially curious how they added bluetooth and ibeacon support into this.

[1] http://thingsquare.com/customers/ [2] http://www.contiki-os.org/

This programming problem was what actually got me interested in compilers in the first place.

When I was 16 and learning how to program in Java, there was an online competition for high schoolers, and this was one of the introductory programming questions. Your program had to execute in under a time limit (5 seconds, N=13), and I had come up with the best solution I could and was still at 7 seconds. It took me the rest of the month spending hours a day reading on speed optimizations in order to cut down every unnecessary instruction, and remove every intermediate variable. Eventually, the program executed in 4.9 seconds.

While quite interesting, the problem only took an afternoon to implement the algorithm. What differentiated my chops from my competitors was that I could improve my program beyond the first implementation.

I've run into something similiar on a different benchmark where inserting some 'nops' to the preamble for a function actually sped it up as much as 14% because it made the function align better with a memory boundary so the CPU could access it faster. Benchmarks, especially ones that don't control for the cases where 'luck'/alignment/register use/etc can influence the outcome, are terrible testcases to explore behaviour.

Within 10 seconds of loading it up, I had already glitched into a wall and trapped myself in a box. Yep, that's nostalgia.

>even older Russian and Chinese jets that can fly faster and farther and maneuver better

Dogfighting is obsolete as homing missiles fly faster, farther, and are more maneuverable than the plane carrying them. Air superiority belongs to the plane with the more sophisticated radar and stealth that is flying at a higher altitude. Flying faster also aids intercepting incoming aircraft or escaping interception attempts.