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Why are we talking about checking return values (which are generated by a function according to its interface and should not be checked) when we should be talking about checking configuration values (which are generated by humans according to whatever they type on their keyboard and should be checked). Also why are we talking about checking stuff when we should be talking about one bug bringing the entire system down?

Except extraordinary is correlated with excellent because this premise:

> We can all achieve excellence

is false in practice.

Out of curiosity I wondered what was the biggest Sqlite databse in my filesystem:

find / -name *.sqlite -printf '%s %p\n' 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | head -n 1

The winner is `favicons.sqlite` from Firefox profile directory, which is 40 MB.

You made an optimization for the future when enough bottlenecks have been fixed such that this one part becomes the bottleneck.

If I'm not mistaken, OAuth 2 does not support multiple clients, but in this case the token authorized by a user ends up being known by 2 clients: Xkit, and Xkit's customer. What exactly is being shown in the consent screen the user accepts? Are users aware that they grant scopes to 2 distinct parties? Couldn't this be considered abuse by the SaaS Apps themselves?

- Ebooks are the most important invention of the XXIth century.

- Jeff Bezos is a God.

- A bunch of weird corporate tactics worked for us at the time so they are lessons on how to make a successful product.

Either this archive exists elsewhere, either now is not the proper time for panic -- it was when Google became sole owner of this archive.

> Removing support is a passive action; you accomplish it by just doing nothing. Calling exit() is rather more on the aggressive side.

It's more graceful than the program exiting in a bad way because you passively decided to stop support.

In order to disable 2FA, Google requires an authentication cookie (something you possess) as well as the password (something you know). This is 2FA.

Communicate the fact that it's going to be well moderated and isn't a bastion of free speech.

Well I want to keep my data basically forever. I just don't want Google to have a copy of it. Possibly what is happening here is the exact opposite.

Allowing password pasting has been a standard recommendation from the security community for years.

"Moonshot" and "Apollo" as in "vast spending of money for a show of that isn't actually transformative but is cool"?

> as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter

Doesn't the paradox arise precisely because the time at which the atom will interact is probabilistic?

You are talking about the conceptual notion of a "fact", which is out of human reach. Outside of mathematics, labelling anything as a fact is an opinion, and the label is considered okay as long as everyone involved has a high confidence about this opinion.

For example, if you let an apple fall down to the ground and you say "The apple fell to the ground", then you can't really know whether it's a fact or not, because you don't have access to the official logs of the Universe where it would be recorded that "An apple fell to the ground". So you have to trust your senses (and for example the fact that you're not under hallucination or visualizing an illusion) to put some confidence into this belief. If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.

When it comes to complex questions about society and everything that we can read on the news, such degree of confidence is very rare. In the end, the threshold at which you consider something to be "a fact" is subjective and for this reason I think all this "facts aren't opinions" thing is dangerous, because it gives the illusion that what we call "facts" are absolute and binary, whereas it's often things we just have a high confidence about, and so it opens the door to slide our standard of what a fact is.

What matters is that our view of the world shouldn't be shaped by what we hope or believe the world _should_ be, but by what it really _seems_ to be. And that is sufficient enough without having to get on one's high horse with "facts".

I don't question the casual usefulness of the word "fact" in appropriate contexts, but when the discussion at hand precisely handles the very nature of what is a fact and what isn't, we need to dig down the true implications of the word.

It becomes more complicated as soon as a you have a sidebar with "Last articles" in which case you would need to edit each single HTML files to edit the sidebar consistently. Even with a single archives page you need to think about updating the archive for each new article. Also Markdown is definitely more author-friendly than HTML, but that's more like an extra.

> assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT

Now try work.

Its interpreter is not a web browser.

> But until such an interaction occurs, the electron has been acting like a wave all along.

What does that mean? Most interpretations of quantum mechanics consider the wave function to be an abstraction to model the system, not something that is actually tangible. Even in theories that consider it real (e.g. De Broglie-Bohm) it acts as some sort of field, not something that actually occupies space.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. But if talent starts working hard, it's game over.

If you have zero coupling, it means you have multiple products.

> somebody else can pick it up and relicense their distribution of it, including saying you cannot do things with it.

How do you differentiate the Getty Image distribution of it vs. the original public domain distribution?

> but not honoring them might hinder current (or future) cooperation.

Then you're not honoring sunk cost. You're honoring current or future costs, just like you should do.

In this case you're merely using history to make a relevant choice about the future. You're not honoring the sunk cost because of the investment, you're just using the lessons your learnt while making this investment.

I "self-trained" at coding before going to CS school. I don't have a citation for my claim (but it seems like a very reasonable theory to me).

Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple, because they truly enjoy it and, many times, have learnt it as a hobby. Their career choice have never been a masterplan on winning big, but it just happened to be so, so they feel like they're fraud.

Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. We're talking weekends and night of trying out stuff, hacking stuff, reading, learning, etc. It's often an invisible investment, because it's a hobby and it doesn't feel like work.

In the end, programmers don't really need to dig that far to reach a point where they're good at building stuff using enough layers of knowledge to make what they do absolutely obscure to others.

Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property; but programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options, HTTP status codes, API interfaces, etc. It seems like highly advanced knowledge to be able to solve a health problem from a set of symptoms, but from the point of view of the layman, solving a computer problem from an error message is about as magic as it gets.

Surely users savvy enough to trust a binary are savvy enough to disable the warning.

Not sure if it's available to everybody or just Europeans, but there is a checkbox to disable it (I don't remember whether it's checked by default or not).

Settings -> Support -> Terms & Policies -> disable "Viewing Information Services" (there is detailed information about what this checkbox entails, and it includes using ACR on screenshots)

Could be a placebo button of course, but that would be a pretty big violation of GDPR and a risk for a huge fine.

There is no mention of uptime or SLA.

The argument is that the blacklist is as much a SPOF as a session server would be. The blacklist kills the statelessness.