rwos

GNU rm has exactly that built-in:

    $ rm -rf /
    rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’
    rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

While static analysis can be quite a powerful tool, it doesn't magically fix everything. Some of the typical web-application vulnerabilities are shell/SQL injections, XSS, and CSRF. Also, passwords saved in a insufficiently hashed form, or even in plain-text. All of those are bugs on the architecture level, or "business logic bugs".

The semantic diff is pretty cool. It will probably be pretty hard to apply that to C (cpp) and Lisp (macros, and especially the programmable readers in some Lisps). But maybe we don't actually need a solution for the general case and displaying "most" changes in a semantic way is enough.

I imagine these higher-level diffs could be especially useful for things where one doesn't have that much insight into the source code - for example, scanning for API changes between two versions of a Framework (where maybe even displaying only changes to public methods/exports would be enough). In any case, diffs on the AST level seem like a good, and quite under-explored, idea.

Is this censored? There's nothing related to copyright infringement or porn in there. Also, the categories and trending/most-searched selection seems arbitrary. Every country has a different set of data.

This was on /r/programming and now it's here - I'm sorry, but I don't really understand what this is all about. 600 lines doesn't seem ultra-small to me. And Lisp - well sure, not too common a language for games, but it's not as if this was written in a purely functional style or something. In fact, it looks like pretty standard imperative programming to me - it wouldn't look much different in C.

Am I missing something here?

I'm not the parent, but I do web development - here's how I understand it:

> hard for end users to customise

I think, he means that a css-based ("modern") solution would allow end-users to just swap the css (a feature most web-browsers have as a built-in) to change the site's appearance - whereas you cannot change the way a <table> looks, for example. That is, you can't easily make <table> columns appear below each other, for example.

> works terribly in any other context than a desktop browser

The parent probably means modern non-desktop web browsers, i.e. ones with javascript and media-query support. Using media queries would allow automatically changing the site's appearance to something more usable for small-screen devices (for example) - by using bigger buttons/links/up-vote-triangles or something like that.

The problems you mentioned are orthogonal to that - mostly caused by devs that only target js-enabled modern browsers. That's bad, of course, but it's not part of "modern web development" per se - it's just bad web development.

> plays terribly with all other web tooling

If you use "modern" web-dev methods (that is, styling only per css), other (web-)services that display your site in different contexts (think google reader or desktop mail readers or something like that) can swap or remove the css and get the content (including semantics like "headline", "list" and so on) without the styling ("these are table columns", "this is centered"). In theory, at least.

I don't understand the rest of the points either, to be honest. <center> and <table> are very compact, compared to equivalent HTML/CSS solutions - that's part of the reason why people keep using them.

Ideally, there should be a feature that lets you see the personalized (that is, real) search results of others. Maybe divided into target groups ("programmers", "male users under 20", etc.). Of course, everyone's real search results will be slightly different, incorporating "+1"s of Google+ friends for example.

But, I assume, the bulk of the search ranks will be the same for people in the same (advertising) target group. (I have nothing to back up that assumption - it just would be the most sensible thing to do, I think.)

You could have said the same thing about unix-like operating systems in 1991 - yet, somebody wrote one from scratch without a full-time team.

I'm not trying to put this little project here down, far from it. I think it's pretty neat. I can imagine even neater (if that's a word) things, though... :-)

What a nice way to find out that my rather old Thinkpad (on Debian testing) now has WebGL support - I only updated everything from time to time, and apparently stuff actually started working. Great!

Great hack, too. I really, really want that thing as a screensaver!