reeses

I actually had a mini panic attack thinking about that.

The best thing about markdown is pandoc.

I am very confused by the implication that TeX or LaTeX make it easy to create a document that looks exactly the way you want. Unless you want it to look like a paper presented to a publication that has a mandatory style, and a package is available with that style, it's just not true.

And that is almost the whole point. Most people are idiots about how to present written material, so TeX and friends make those decisions for us. It's especially frustrating when you have to dink with floats, because now you're second-guessing TeX, and it exacts a high price.

I've used TeX for over 25 years and I'm comfortable saying that I could produce documents of a similar quality, with better support for collaboration, with Word.

I still use TeX for many projects but the Word style capability is great.

Markdown still sucks, though. :)

You should sell an app that puts your worst photos next to the subject in their own photographs.

I cannot take a decent photo in most cases, but I had the opportunity to have a photo session with someone who normally works with models and celebrities and it made a huge difference. What I took away from the experience was that wearing makeup, standing in painful positions, and having someone yelling "hot!" "Ooh" "saucy!" and "yeah, like that, again!" makes for better photos, not just a fun Saturday night.

You may have discovered an obvious feature of this approach.

It could be a very subtle AML tactic. BofA asked me if I remembered the name of the staff member who set up my business account prior to letting me make a wire transfer. Of course, since they can't tell you it's AML you think they're insane until you catch on and give the standard answers.

Some people actually prefer the palm oil in the Nestle KitKats, just as Cadbury tried to tell everyone.

I suspect it's a similar phenomenon with people who prefer HFCS Coke to cane sugar Coke. If you're used to palm oil, cocoa butter will make your chocky bar taste "off".

Fortunately, with infinite processing and storage, time is irrelevant. :)

Flip the switch and you'll have real intelligence (as opposed to our lazy Approximate Intelligence) just in time for the immediate heat death of the universe.

Plus, if the one on Mars kills anyone, we all know how that movie goes. One does not simply walk away from killing an extraterrestrial.

I'm going to lick someone with a very bad cold now, just in case.

Good point, although it was a bit cheeky of me to generalize anything these days as Von Neumann vs Harvard. Thanks for keeping me honestish. :)

Awesome, let's walk through every library, system, and machine call exercised by your ruby code. What happens if you gc while hitting a chunk of ram that was just hit with a corruption causing cosmic ray while your OS paged out your app because your intrusion detection/prevention service went defcon two on a leap millisecond that was announced since your last OS patch and your locale was set to C?

Please support your answer with tracing analysis over a set of one billion Monte Carlo simulations and present an accurate and up-to-date IDEF6 model of the application system.

Tail calls are only helpful if optimized into jumps instead of function calls.

Mission critical applications tend to use working, proven, components. Why buy more complexity?

What I find confusing about the article is that it describes how to avoid problems on a completely different architecture. ARM (Von Neumann) vs v850 (Harvard), hard stack exception vs none, etc.

These differences and resulting inapplicable recommendations confound what could be an interesting article.

Artists love creating other artists. We all mostly remember the hundreds of a-ha moments that changed our view of the world again. It's sad how eager most of us are to share the knowledge. :)

Depending on where you are, you may do well to find a tiny studio with good reviews on yelp or, if you're near a school, look for tutors.

In the mean time, definitely keep doodling but occasionally try to doodle something you can see. Then laugh at it and shade a sphere or a cone. :)

This is one area where everyone has potential. You just need to develop it with some basic tools, most of which involve ways of seeing.

That is so two bubbles ago.

You may be in my boat, which is actually a wheat allergy.

I had serious headaches, really irritable skin, unclear thinking, and other consequences until I went for a checkup on the advice of a similarly afflicted friend. I would recommend a visit to your local allergist to nail it down.

If you're in the US, the only provider of decent 'gluten free' versions of foods normally produced with wheat, oat, etc. is Udi's. Buying GF is the easiest way to avoid wheat, if that is your problem.

At any rate, don't self-diagnose too much. Bread is too awesome to give up without a fight. :)

If someone offers you money, take it. Smart salespeople shut up the instant the prospective says,"yes."

It's your tone more than anything. I read some of your previous posts to see if you were a d-bag and I came to the conclusion that you're not[1]. This reads more like the post was a button-pusher for you. I can relate. :)

Unfortunately, even with the tone removed, the comment hits that "top-voted middlebrow" button for many of the other people on the site. I would however say that for TFA itself as well.

[1] the opinion of some random interdweeb carries a lot of weight, I know. :)

Addressed (hah) in the article. It's Turing complete for naive values of Turing complete.

It's a bit tongue-in-cheek. Much of the narrative is, with cute tidbits such as

    Code that self-modifies by calling read() is clearly the future of computing.

Corroborated by the png he linked.

Exactly. As an immediate counter example, look at San Jose over the past 40 years.

I find it much easier to pixel-hawk and correct layout issues when I save an offensive generated page and then edit it in an HTML editing environment (Lighttable is good for this with JS/CSS weirdness as well).

I can do the same with the various web dev plugins, but I rather like being able to save the intermediate result and not have to worry about a refresh changing the underlying state of my view.

As a person who ended up in a kerfluffle over some things said to coworker friends, offsite, at a casual non-work event, I understand whereof you speak.

However, the instant it's on site, talking to HR about it is the right thing to do. They will give advice about the situation as well as document that you raised the issue.

It's largely a CYA move in that you're assertively defending yourself against claims listing you among the group of people engaged in dumbass behavior.

You can also anonymize the source of the humor. HR doesn't care about you, the joker, or even gay people. HR cares about protecting the company. They'll send an email proscribing such tomfoolery and consider the issue resolved.

"So did Dan White?"

Remember when people were afraid to enter their credit cards online, so they would call a customer service rep and read it to that person over the phone?

The key piece to keep in mind is that the info on that little piece of plastic is never "safe".

If I were warning my mother, I'd just follow your hypothetical above. Of course, if the outcomes of these data breaches start including other identity theft, such as the "$50,000 twitter name"[1] hijack, more realistic phishing attacks, etc., then things are going to get interesting.

[1] Which is of course silly since the TOS specify that they are not to be sold.

Because the world sucks. Many times, your cc provider will detect suspicious activity and freeze your account, but one of the common patterns of card theft is a validation phase followed by a "hammer it until it cries" phase. It's quite possible to have a few small charges show up on your account that you might miss because your overall bill seems fine. Usually, once the card is proven good, you'll get the lovely bill for a first-class flight to Qatar.

I agree that a cc user should not have to care about any of this, but people responsible for protecting your money are not so responsible.

In fact, this is how a lot of heavy iron operates. You can use the same "binaries" ('TIMI') on your i/System i/AS400/POWER7 and the system will recompile what is essentially bytecode and save the machine-specific object code.

Alpha did something similar, and a number of feedback-directed/profile-based optimizing compilers will perform similar optimizations, but they are less flexible unless repeated cycles are performed in the deployed environment.

You should not use any card that does not give you a 100% guarantee that you will not be held responsible for erroneous charges. It really doesn't matter the retailer – they almost all suck. The older the company or the faster its growth, the more you should worry. Push that worry onto Amex or your bank.

PCI is surprisingly easy (and anyone can look it up at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/docu...). It's basically all about "data at rest," covering what can be stored, how it must be stored, and how it should be stored. If a merchant can't meet the requirements, then they are required to demonstrate "compensating controls" which can literally be "we have a project in place to fix this before the audit a year from now."

"Data at rest" involves (in this case) credit card information stored on "disk" (SSD, etc.) for more than a short period of time. This generally excludes virtual memory, some queueing software, etc. If it touches the disk for ten seconds but is then wiped, you're compliant.

Then there are a list of "musts". You must have firewalls protecting the internal network (and review the rulesets), documentation on any connectivity to cardholder data, dataflow diagrams, only allow essential traffic in the card info environment, wall off wireless access, have an IPS, change all vendor defaults on any devices that could possibly screw you, minimize server responsibility (so don't run your smtp relay on the machine that also encrypts your card info), rotate encryption keys every x days, don't store CID/CVV/track 2/full mag-tape data from the card, scan your systems for changes/compromise/unauthorized access, maintain nonreputable audit trails, etc.

PCI is ratcheting down the requirements so that there is less room for interpretation. Previously, just using Oracle's obfuscation toolkit would be enough. This would protect you (more or less) if someone had access to your block device in raw mode or your data files in what-the-hell-is-your-dba-thinking mode, but an Edward Snowden could log in and SELECT all of your card info.

One of the key parts of this for consumers to keep in mind is that this is a massive PCI violation. Target neglected many of the most basic requirements in terms of network segmentation and data protection. Target is a large tier-one retailer. They had 3rd party audits to "guarantee" PCI compliance.

However, the 3rd party is usually a single 'auditor' who interviews the staff and looks at the network diagrams provided by the IT department. This information may be inaccurate to the point that it may not even exist.

The focus in these audits is almost always ecommerce. I'm sure Target's ecommerce site has been scoped very thoroughly. Almost every retailer is just as exposed. While every client I've worked with has (by the time I left) been PCI compliant on the ecommerce side, the internal networks are often completely flat, even across global locations. SOX is a joke as a result, as there is no separation of concerns.

We found an 'agency' that was really one guy with awesome connections to designers, trade show staff (so we ended up at least 'Bronze' sponsors to every show with almost no outlay), where to spend money on presence, and a really good sense of ability when it came to young talent.

He projected costs on a monthly basis, and we had the ability to say whether we were OK with the amount or whether we needed him to find lower-cost options.

We were pretty well capitalized (my co-founder and I are old :-)) but we paid between $8k and $25k/month, most of the high-end occurring when we were hitting competitive trade shows for premium placement. Even then, he was smart about finding spaces that were on an arterial aisle leading to refreshments and surrounded either by totally JV firms or large constructs that had a history of understaffing (so we would catch their overflow).

Edit: Just to reinforce my original comment, if we had a tool that could help this guy be superman and trim our costs even further, we would be all over it.