throwaway_7718's comments

Thanks a heap for this! Coincidentally, there's a course on the Divine Comedy starting today (http://dante.georgetown.edu/).

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: Nightmare – Guided Intro to Binary Exploitation/Reverse Engineering

Happy to help!

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: Nightmare – Guided Intro to Binary Exploitation/Reverse Engineering

Props to @travmatt for this find (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22401990)

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: Twenty-one cities in India will run out of groundwater by 2020

If you already have rainwater harvesting, good for you, but if you depend on borewells and tankers for water, then news like this is not alarmist and is worrisome. Borewells are already becoming dry throughout the city, and digging deeper results in more brackish water. Cementing every single part of land, and not building recharge wells only adds to the problem. (Tankers are reliable for now, but it's silly to put the control of a vital resource in the hands of a private entity that will always be attracted to the highest bidder. The poorer sections of society will be affected first and hardest)

As the population of Bengaluru increases, the demand for water will increase. It's not just a distribution issue, it's a civic planning and ecological issue. Encroachment of lakes[0] and the booming real estate market aren't helping the situation at all.

Also, desalination is not as easy as one thinks [1].

Better solutions to this problem are effective civic planning, ensuring that the groundwater table is recharged, (as you rightly mentioned) rainwater harvesting, and preserving the lakes Bengaluru has.

[0] http://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bangalore-water-bodies-nd...

[1] https://www.hydrofinity.com/blog/why-desalination-is-not-the...

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: GitHub Sponsors

Say a sponsored developer Bob has some software, that another person, Alice forks. The fork becomes wildly more successful than the original for some reason, and Bob loses many sponsors in the course of time. Would a situation like this force developers to use restrictive licenses? (I get that Bob can just integrate Alice's fork into his original - assume that it's too much work for Bob to do so)

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: GitHub Sponsors

I feel the same way, honestly. Thinking of it in a different way - torvalds and gregkh get paid by the Linux Foundation. Say it went bankrupt, they would surely need to get other jobs, unless they were sponsored by the community. Many developers of the kernel today are sponsored by their employers. The question is, how many of them would do it (out of sheer enthusiasm) if they aren't getting paid to?

throwaway_7718 | 6 years ago | on: CMU Computer Systems: Self-Grading Lab Assignments (2018)

CS:APP is hands down THE book that every person interested in the low-level stuff in computer systems should own. But heads up, anyone who is considering to buy the book - please get the North American Edition, NOT the global edition.

I made the mistake of getting the Global edition, because of its considerably less cost, and because I couldn't afford the North American one - it was only after that I checked out the book site, where the authors mention that the global edition is chock full of errors [0].

I don't blame the authors, nor even the people who were responsible for 'the generation of a different set of practice and homework problems'. I can get printing the book in B&W, reducing paper quality, and publishing as a paperback to cut costs, but it's baffling why the publishers compromise on the actual quality of the content itself.

Amazon is full of similar 'PSAs' about not buying the global edition [1].

[0] http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/errata.html

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...