m0nastic
Joined 16 years ago
Karma
5,097
Submissions
784
Member since
Apr 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 7 years ago
The research paper authors also posted a python package on GitHub that generates these reports: https://github.com/responsibleproblemsolving/energy-usage
Comment · 10 years ago
It's of varying importance depending on what field of security you're talking about, but generally it's the chasm that separates entry-level security folks from the rest.
Using systems administration as an analog, there exists a class of sysadmins who can't write even basic scripts. Their ability to troubleshoot or problem solve are limited to using predefined tools. Whole categories of tasks will be infeasible for them to accomplish (mostly because of the amount of time it would take to do them manually, not necessarily because they are technically impossible).
Lacking the ability to do any programming limits their job prospects to the bottom of the sysadmin barrel. That being said, programming isn't necessarily a prerequisite for their job, it's just a ceiling.
Going back to security, most tasks benefit from the ability to automate some part of them. I come from application security, where that frequently manifests in having to quickly piece together tools for interfacing with a specific protocol or API. Application consulting exacerbates that even more, because you'll usually have to do all of this in a very short amount of time, so that you can spend the allotted assessment time actually doing the assessment, and not trying to get your tools to work with the environment.
Comment · 10 years ago
This is a wonderful sentiment, but as someone who lives next door to this place, you absolutely don't want to eat there.
If you come to DC, by all means buy some food from there, but then throw it in the garbage and I'll happily treat you to a much better dinner.
Comment · 10 years ago
I'm biased because John Ennis played one of the lawyers, but that one was absolutely my favorite of these.
Comment · 11 years ago
A few years back I picked up "Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volumes 1-3" on Amazon[1] for something I was working on and they are fascinating.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Criminal-Tattoo-Encyclopaedia-...
Comment · 11 years ago
I can't narrow it down to one (it's like trying to pick a favorite binary message format), but the best I can do:
A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood. A beautifully somber story of a gay man dealing with loss in the 60's. When I read it as a kid, it helped deal with the sense of alienation I was feeling during my adolescence. Also the movie a few years back (while ending fairly different from the book), was awesome.
The Big Sleep - Chandler. Literary people all seem to prefer Hammett to Chandler, but for my money there's never been better prose written before or since. "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" and "I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." are two of my favorite sentences of all time.
Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas. It's technically an autobiography, but I read it as a novel. More alienation (this time in 1970's Cuba), but written amazingly well (even the English translation).
Dear Mr. Henshaw - Beverly Cleary. I'm not embarrassed to list a kids book as one of my favorite novels (considering how many people on here I'm sure loved Harry Potter). It's a story about a kid who's dad left him, and it's written as a series of one-sided letters to an author (the titular Mr. Henshaw). I re-read it about twice a year (it's a short book).
Comment · 11 years ago
I've been using Haskell at work for the past two years, but despite the fact that it's been a great investment, I don't really like articles like this.
I find evangelism gross, and in particular, developer technology evangelism especially distasteful.
That said, I take issue with the objectiveness of your points. For the first one, there are indeed quite a few successful systems written in Haskell (I suppose I might be quibbling with your definition of "successful"). Facebook is using Haskell for a few things internally (including their rule engine for fraud/spam processing), Standard Charter is using Haskell. In fact, here's a whole site of people using Haskell in industry (https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry)
I do think that it's only recently that you're starting to see projects/products built with Haskell that aren't libraries. Just this week there's been a bunch of web frameworks released (Airship and Spock, with Silk releasing a REST API framework a couple of months ago).
I'd like to see more projects that people can use that don't have to care about the fact that the software is written in Haskell (databases and data analytics systems are a particular area I'd like to see become less Java-focused).
Your second point on mutable state seems counter to a lot of the current conventional wisdom of the past five years, which is that immutability is vastly preferred to mutability. This is becoming true in Javascript (with React and Underscore), has always been true in Clojure, and is becoming more and more important in any system that deals with concurrency.
You can certainly disagree that mutable state is the root of all evil, or even the most important problem with modern development; but I don't think it's accurate to paint Haskell as being the weirdo fringe language that's advocating immutability is the way to go. They have a lot of company on that front, they've just been making the point for a lot longer than most.
Your third point seems like you just completely made it up. Do you have evidence that Haskell programmers are "usually smarter than Java programmers"?, or that they are somehow inordinately picky about what projects they work on? Do you know many professional developers who work in Haskell?
It's true that the population of Java programmers is probably an order of magnitude larger than Haskell programmers (the number of universities who still teach Java for their introductory CS classes would probably guarantee that's the case), but contrary to what message board lore would have you believe, Haskell isn't some magical "smart person" language.
I'm an idiot and I haven't had any trouble using it full-time. I don't use it for crazy math stuff, or advanced computer-science research. I use it to process events, interact with databases, and display CRUD operations (like probably 80% of most enterprise-y software development).
Haskell's design flaws, while certainly existent, don't seem appreciably above or below any other language (I'm trying not to be smug, I actually think Haskell is much better designed than most any other language). I can happily attest that the record field scoping has not actually been an issue (although maybe I've just been lucky, and there's actually a bunch of other idioms for dealing with the scoping issue like lenses).
site: chris.tengulabs.com email: [email protected] Twitter: m0nastic
I tend to avoid commenting on things I'm not pretty familiar with. Consequently, I don't post much on here.