sp4rki

Also, required tor-talk discussion: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-August/...

As a man who a few hours ago was complimented on my beard (which btw is a total castaway & 6 months of growth type of beard) and how it makes me look "handsome" in a casual business situation, I see this type of statements as flawed and near-sighted. The female in question is married and I have a significant other and the comment was issued in a small break between talking about software all morning. I felt neither threatened, reduced to looks, or uncomfortable in any way. My ego got a very slight boost if we're actually keeping score. I don't see why the person in this story should feel objectified by being told she's pretty.

Nevertheless, I decided that I should go ask my girlfriend what she thought about this situation and about your comment. You know, to get the female perspective. Her answer was pretty much in the same boat... And then she starts a 15 minute rant about how modern women are destroying the values set by real feminist women who worked their asses off to achieve some notion of equality, and how Coco Chanel is the reason women now wear pants and hats.

Our collective opinion? The fact that being told you're pretty or handsome is seen as objectification and something to be avoided is because we've become so out of touch with reality and out own humanity that entitlement has become as much a problem as objectification is.

Oh don't get me wrong. I agree with you. Software security — actually scratch that — security in general is harder in 2014 and by correlation more challenging to boot. I meant that security research used to be more fun before Assange, Snowden, and the NSA came along.

I still love security and have become better at it throughout the years, but the ambience of conspiracy and the out of touch with reality legal ramifications and obstacles make me long for the days when "security was fun".

Or maybe I'm just old now and I'm just reminiscing the good ol days.

I used to be very into the hacking, software cracking and reverse engineering scenes when I was a teen – spending my nights discussing Softice cracking methodologies, scripting telnet fingerprinting utilities, and other trivialities in IRC while taking care of FXPing releases all night.

One day my mom's email stopped working, so I contacted a CSR for the ISP. After 2 hours of being passed around to their highest level of tech support and explaining that she signed up for some shitty extra antivirus service some time before and that her actual email was probably aliased to an account on the special antivirus server, they kept insisting the account didn't exist and that I was lying. I tried to explain that it was almost a given that the alias just got deleted by someone doing clean-up too many times and I lost all patience. I dedicated all night to gaining access to their mail servers and getting my moms account back up.

I documented everything and the next day I went over and talked to their head engineer. I explained everything while sitting in a computer in his office proving the hack. I got a free lunch and 3 months of free internet service out of it. I was also called in a month later to corroborate the vulnerability was patched.

Two or three weeks later I got suspended from school for stealing some exams from the teachers shares in their "private" network. I covered my tracks, but a girl in the computer room at the time accused me of doing "something fishy" and I was caught with a floppy that contained the exams. That drama took the better part of the month and included my lawyer (my uncle doing me a favor) making incredible legal threats. I almost failed that quarter, but I did get off mostly unpunished.

I do development and specialize in security and risk assessment these days. It's nowhere as fun as it used to be in the early 90's.

I've been in this position also. Same question. I also added what the difference between setTimeout() and setInterval() is, and example usages of both. It's incredible that a question where the primary answer is right there in the function names causes such confusion on people that are supposedly "front end engineers with years of experience".

Off course, disaster is an understatement. All three questions where the demise of 100% of our interviewees. We ended up hiring a sql programmer and teaching him what he needed to know.

It's a major shift I agree... but it's a great decision if executed correctly.

Every company has a set of main goals that imply that development can't be completely autonomous, but hiring good developers is not just about code it's also about people with a vision and a sense of purpose for your product. Take the way Github works for example: at the end of the day their main goal is an accessible hosted interface to git, to make git version control easier and ubiquitous; nevertheless having that main goal does not stop their developers from creating new features (say for example a desktop client) that make the product better though it may or may not directly translate to their main goal.

If you have a company that develops software and your developers have the autonomy to work on things that they actually believe will further increase the companies value (be it an interface change, bug fixes, or the refactoring of bad code) you will most definitely have a better result than if you make people work on things that might not be their forte or that are uninteresting to them.

Now I don't mean that people should have a complete free reign of the product, as some things are too important to forgo because no one wants to do them, but giving developers the chance to work on things they actually believe in as opposed to things that might not translate to creating value in their minds can go a long way towards good morale and retention, and un-doublty a better product because of it.

I've been a bookworm from early age and even though I slow down when the material is highly technical and requires better comprehension I don't find the words being repeated in my head. As a matter of fact, while reading I find that while I do talk in my head, I might summarize or ask myself questions about a paragraph (stuff like: "Don't believe. Rem. check refs", like I did a few times in this article), as opposed to repeating the words I'm reading. The only moment I find I'm repeating words mentally or sub-vocalizing is when I'm writing, and I believe I do so to get the underlying tone of what I'm writing.

When I read a novel, I tend to want to spend more time immersing in the world and the events in it. While I slow myself down in this case, I tend to make images in my head while reading and I've found that it becomes inherently harder to do if I'm subvocalizing... it removes focus from the imagination side of things for me. I don't really believe that it's impossible to read without subvocalization.

In any case, one of the tricks I use to speed read at a moderate speed (as opposed to skimming) is to black out mentally everything but the current line and process it as a whole. It works like imagining a rectangle enclosing the current line. Works wonders for me taking into account I'm the fastest reading person in my social circles.

Exactly! We don't know what Aaron would have been sentenced to, and it would probably have been a mere fraction of the maximum penalty. There was something else going on in his life that we don't and most probably won't know or ever understand that lead him to take his own life. Regardless the world would have been a better place with him around, and it's a sad state of affairs that the rules and laws regarding computer crimes are so out of context and maybe even unjust. That being said, it was Aaron who took his own life, not the justice system regardless of how fucked up we believe it to be.

My point is that he was not going to serve 50 nor 35 years. There is a lot of precedent already regarding "cyber crimes", and in most of them the served time is but a fraction of the maximum penalty. This happens each and every day and is the reason that plea bargains, judges, and juries exist.

On another point, you mentioned a plethora of violent punishments, which the topic at hand isn't. First it wasn't a punishment yet, second it wasn't violent, third it isn't unusual at all as it's the same process used for almost every criminal trial specially in an accusatory trial, and fourth cruelty is in the eye of the beholder. On this last point I'd like to make one distinction: cruelty is mostly referred to in two different contexts: 1) Physical pain: in which case there was none to speak of here, and 2) Disregard for the suffering of others (irregardless of physical pain): in which case she is both crueler than you and me because she prosecuted a bright young man with all means available to him to the point of having an influence in his death, and as cruel as both of us because we've all been in a position in which we have not cared about the suffering of another human being, either because you're (not directed to you, just trying to make a point here, don't take offense) not interested in middle eastern politics and international conflict, or because I didn't want to give my last dollar to that poor homeless man on the corner with arthritis.

That's a very slippery slope to walk on slippery shoes. Say someone breaks into your neighbors house and steals 10k worth of stuff. Oh wait, he shouldn't go to jail because it was a non violent crime. So he doesn't go to jail and has to pay restitution. Now he's pushed for money so your house is next, and this time you catch the thief. Who's to say someone that is willing to break the law and steal from you is not willing to hurt you to not get caught?

> Isn't her job to pursue justice? Nothing about this strikes me as just.

Her job is to pursue justice within the boundaries of stablished laws, which technically and pragmatically Aaron did break. She didn't create the CFAA and it's modifications via the Patriot Act and the ITERA. That is what we should be focusing on, not some witch hunt directed to a person who most invariably was just performing her job duties bound by the law she claims to uphold.

I truly doubt that Aaron really thought that 50 or even 35 years was a realistic sentence to be honest. Mitnick was charged with wire fraud and illegal possession of computer files and 23 other charges and did 5 years and change. All other hackers that have been convicted by the US have done from months to 4 years, and most have even gotten the supervised release with no computer use null.

Also I really don't see the cruel and unusual here. It's the same procedure that everyone else gets. He should have taken this opportunity to help shape a movement for the change of CFAA and ITERA, enter the list of "elite hackers" that have been wronged by their country (for a great PR boost nonetheless), and bring to the spotlight his main cause of information liberation. He probably didn't take that route and opted for suicide because he was depressed or had some mental issue that was aggravated (but not caused by, I make the distinction) because of the pressure of his conviction and the existing (though very low) possibility that he might actually do hard time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm on Aaron's side, but all the fear mongering and hyperbole lately is unbecoming. We as a community are right now grasping at straws trying to make Carmen Ortiz as this horrible monster, when she was basically just a woman doing her job. She's not Charles Manson. Let's battle the CFAA and try to get things to change instead of focusing on a little woman who will most probably never suffer any repercussion for this, and seriously it's doubtful that she deserves any either.

I actually believe the comic has a lot to do with situations pertaining to marriage - or any relationship whatsoever even if the poster didn't think much of it. I think that was kind of the point of the original root comment and the supporting response by the parent, and seems perfectly valid to me comic notwithstanding.

On your second point, there's an enormous difference between saying "I can't continue with the project, someone else want's it?" and "I can't continue, because of A, B, C...Z, someone wants?". When you add the personal touch to a question it's inevitable that someone is going to answer with a personal experience. The same rhetoric you use can easily apply on the inverse case. Making unsolicited comments about you marriage life to a crowd of technologists/geeks/whatever should not be noble (whatever this means in this context anyways) either then. If the project developer didn't want advice about his married life, he should have kept his marriage troubles out of the spotlight.

In any case, there's one important distinction to make: Giving such marriage advice is worth it if at least one person that needs it reads it. The original poster probably didn't give marriage advice because of the odd chance the developer will read it; I mean lets be realistic here, the poster/blog-author is not the developer with marriage troubles, so there's no reason to believe the developer will read this. He most certainly did because maybe someone here in HN could be going through a phase in his/her marriage/relationship that could use the couples therapy, and publicly acknowledging the benefit it had for him can have an positive impact on someone that actually needs that advice and is browsing Hacker News instead of attending to his significant other.

Being forcibly removed (as in not asked to resign as is usual in the government "circles") would probably have a disastrous effect on the rest of her career, or lack thereof.

May I ask why? I had used Sass for along time (with Compass) and decided to try Stylus for a pretty big project, and for some unforeseeable reason I ended up with less maintainable post compile css. I really don't understand how I ended up with a mess if they're so alike to be honest and since I've been doing web development for quite some time. It may have been more fault of the project and it's inherent structure, goals, and deadlines, but I would reckon that it wouldn't have been as bad had I done it in Sass.

Why would it recommend one over the other if it's something that's most definitely a user preference? I wish we had stayed with the first syntax as it's "cleaner" in my opinion, but at the end of the day that's exactly what it is: my opinion.

Regarding culture: I once had an interview where one of the co-founders slash CEO (who had the last word on my hire) decided to interview me and showed me some code on part of their - at the time - current production systems. I wanted to test their so called culture, so my answer was basically "This is retarded. I'd like to meet whomever wrote this and give him/her a kick in the teeth for such an ugly implementation of X and Y. I would have done Z..." The CEO answered in turn "That would be me and you're hired. I don't like people that suck up to me, and I want to be told when I'm being an idiot. And I will do the same. Can you live with that?" -"I'm sold!"

I don't get why you're been downvoted. It's as if people don't realize that editing, curating, hosting, and distributing this papers/articles doesn't cost money. I'd be hard pressed to find any one in here that wouldn't complain when they get their hard earned living endangered because someone decided their "product" should be free.

A felony conviction is not necessarily such a big deal and in some cases is even a "good" thing to advance your career if you plan on staying on the "security field". I made a post[1] in this same thread referring to this, but in short: A lot of convicted computer criminals have made very successful careers in the technology/security business out of having been convicted of computer crimes. You might even argue that their success is owed to the controversy, social support, and PR created because of their convictions.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061071

I would argue that a conviction on record in the "security field" is arguably more a PR boost and a boost to his cause than something that hinders your ability to either get a job or support yourself financially post jail time.

I reckon that if Aaron would have gone to trial, he would have most probably not done 35 years, more probably from one to four years - that is taking into account most high profile hacker convictions in the past ten years, with one exception of five years and change plus a screwed up supervised release which I can't remember the timespan of. Six years would have been even better than that.

Look at Kevin Mitnick (the exception to the rule mentioned above), Adrian Lamo, Mark Abene, Kevin Poulsen, etc, etc... They've all had successful careers either as Security Consultants, Technologists/Speakers, Journalists, et al. And you could easily argue that having served time has made them all notable figures in the technology and security scenes. Aaron Swartz could have pleaded guilty (he did steal the documents and trespass) and do his 6 months or go to trial and end up doing a couple of years - and come out a hero with a strengthened cause and higher profile. A Reddit cofounder and high profile activist doing some jail time for his cause is something that would not have been forgotten.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on Aaron's side. The charges where preposterous and the way he was treated was barbaric. I can definitely sympathize. That been said I would have taken the charges and 6 months of jail time as a badge of honor. I mean he did break the law and caused monetary damages to JSTOR. At the end of the day this man would probably have entered that elite group of "convicted computer criminals" who have been able to turn their convictions around to become successful entrepreneurs, public figures, and hell maybe even a Movie/TV personality. Hell Mark Abene even had his debut as an actor in some movie I can't remember.

On another note regarding pharmaceuticals for making it through a day like that, Modafinil works wonders without the jitters that come with caffeine overloads.

That being said, if you've got a two year old I'd think that your sleep schedule will mostly be customized with some daily exercise, avoiding bright screens at night, and supplementing with some melatonin. If you do, I'd advise to try lower doses of melatonin, as lots of times lower doses work better.

Oh yeah I used to use Linux until a company I worked for gave me a white Macbook. I liked it and bought a Macbook Pro. But the longer I worked with OSX the more I got annoyed. 4 years later I'm back on Linux. I didn't meant that you should change (which is why I said YMMV), but I just wanted to give another point of view of the benefits of using a tiling window manager.

A quick google search resulted in this though: https://gist.github.com/311377

If dwm is available in homebrew I guess it probably isn't that complicated to get it running in OSX.

I use a tiling window manager - dwm. Which basically means I have exactly this layout, but easier to manage and control via keyboard. I used to use a mac pro with divvy, sizeup, etc but the workflow is just not as good as when I'm using dwm. Your millage may vary, but I've grown annoyed at the decisions apple takes in OSX to cater to the most common denominator, ie. the common non techy user that likes that their machine looks hip and works how they expect out of the box.

I change my schedule by partying hard a Saturday night and staying awake (not sleeping since getting back from partying) most of Sunday until about 8:30pm at which point I take a hot bath, put on an eye mask and drop dead in bed. I'm usually awake at around 4:30 or 5am Monday. After that I just condition myself to be sleepy when I go into my room. If I have something to do at home after work, I do so out of the room. I basically condition myself to be sleepy the moment I enter my dark room at night by just going to sleep really early. After that I'm AOK to sleep around 9 and wake up at 3 or 4am and get shit done in the hours before going to work. Then when I get home I have time to watch a movie and check emails before collapsing in bed.

I am 28 so I might add that you might want to adjust such a process according to your age and responsibilities. Hell you might not like to party like I do. If that's the case, substitute the partying for reading a good book, working on your startup, testing to see how waterboarding and CIA sleep depravation works, or just having a crapload of coffee.

Also, I know you specifically mentioned no drugs, BUT it might be easier to take a Benadryl at 6pm and use that to wake up early the next day. You will feel a bit drudgey the next day but that's fixed with the first cuppa-o-joe of the day.

Hope I helped :)

PS: I know my methods aren't the healthiest, but they do work for me and I keep in shape with good nutrition and exercise, so that's that.

All the good ones can. It might not be the job of the UX guy to do all the copywriting, but it is his job to make sure the person typing the walls of text is using the correct information, displaying it in a manner that benefits the goals of the product, and in the correct style so as to maximize conversions (or whatever metrics you're using today). A good UX guy/gal is a person who is adept at writing, designing, and hopefully at least a little programming. He/she should also have a great eye for detail and most important than anything else, be as rational as can be and use logic to define a projects direction in addition to one of the most important aspects of the UX field - user/a-b/whatever testing.

I remember being around 7 or 8 and reading this (and other texts of the times in question) and being inspired by the inherent culture which had at it's simplest reduction an insatiable need to consume knowledge by means of discovery. It inspired me to learn C and tinker with Linux and BSD. It also had a part on a quirky math phase I had - which ended causing my math teachers pain when trying to teach a 13 year old the usual basics ended having to grade exams with the most intricate and elaborate (and long) solutions to simple questions and puzzles.

It inspired me to open up my old Packard Bell branded computer and tinker with it until a soldering iron made it meet it's demise. This series of texts also inspired in me a need to know everything there is about computer security, and of course, the only way to put that knowledge to the test is in real world applications like hacking the school systems to take a peek at que quarterly final exams, compromising machines to use as botnets to do fun stuff in IRC, and of course taking advantage of the "unlimited" bandwidth available to the school. Thankfully the school took this as a rebellious kid/teen learning as much as possible about computers and systems and ending up giving me the task to secure their network and physical machines, to the dismay of the actual computer administrators in school.

I bet that this type of reading material inspired an army of people just like me to tinker, hack, and learn as much as possible. Aaron Swartz was probably one of them - being only three years younger than me, and probably one of the most influential in this harsh times for both hackers and activists. Now hopefully his person and his work will become part of the inspiration for future generations, the same way this text by "The Mentor" was for my generation.

Wait wait, so you complain about the mass and short battery life, and when I give you an example of why that's not really true you go ahead and try to compare it to your desktop? That's one of the worst counterpoints I've ever come across. I have a small rack in the corner of my study and the machines there will considerably outer perform not only my t420 but most of the consumer grade machines either prebuilt or enthusiast built. On the other hand, my t420 has better specs that most of what's considered normal for most consumer based setups. I need to run various virtual machines for starters.

The Thinkpad series is know for having some of the best keyboards ever used on a laptop. Even though I prefer using my happy hacking keyboard, I'll take the Thinkpad's keyboard over pretty much anything else. It's so good that they even sell the damn keyboard as a standalone option to regular keyboard. Trackpoint and all. And yes I write code all day.

Regarding my "logic": You don't need to own an Apple to product to be a fanboy, and as such I never said that you owned any. That's all on you and your logic. I ended my post with the same type of sarcastic fanboish retort that you used at the end of yours.

My T420 easily gives me double (sometimes even triple) than your three hours mate. It's very well built so it doesn't break as easily as crappy plastic netbook. Not only is it's hardware "proven" whatever that means, but works extremely well with Linux which is my OS of choice. Oh and almost everything I want to change is easily user replaceable. Probably with the exception of the gpu. And Lenovo provides manuals to do both the easy thinks like changing memory, to medium things like replacing a keyboard (which is a piece of cake), to more complex things like replacing the LCD screen. Oh and 14 inches is not a hulking mass, and it also replaced my desktop. I don't understand Apple fanboys (and I own an iPhone and an iPad)...

Because there is no competition. If you decide to build rocket launchers and the company you source, say the warheads for the rockets, starts sending you lemons (rockets without the high yield explosives you used to get for example), you start sourcing your warheads from someone else. Hell build you own and get on with it.

Now if a company patents a specific warhead that only they can make and you decide to make a rocket launcher that is made specifically to launch rockets with those warheads and no other warheads are compatible with your launcher and suddenly the source company decides that their warheads suck anyways, you just lost your business.

My Takarov can fire any type of 7.62×25mm Takarov ammunition, albiet some is better than others. If it could only fire a specific type of surplus ammo that might not longer be available tomorrow, my gun could end up being useless in a blink of an eye.

Ohh that makes sense, I also wondered if it was Chromium in Linux thing so I opened it up in Chrome in my work iMac and I noticed the same thing, albeit less pronounced. It's very pretty when it does work so that kinda balances it out. In any case your content is worth it, thanks again for the awesome sauce.

Hah! You deserve a billion upvotes because of the chuckles I just had remembering trying to explain the difference between one pass and two pass to a junior dev (which was completely irrelevant to our jobs at the time, I suspect he found something in Stack Overflow about it or something)