shrughes

Joined 18 years ago

Karma

850

Submissions

380

Member since

Jan 22

I have Hacker News schizophrenia, my other account is SamReidHughes.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 12 years ago

If you want to defend against hijackings, the problem you're trying to solve is one that programmers know well: the buffer overflow attack.

In a buffer overflow attack, someone gives a program much more data than it was expecting. The data is too long for the memory allocated for it and overflows into the memory occupied by the program itself. Suddenly the computer is running the attacker's code.

In a hijacking, the same thing happens to a plane. A plane has two separate spaces, one for the people carried on it, and one for the people who control it. A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin. What was cargo is now in control. By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs.

Comment · 12 years ago

So... political speech is permitted for Rupert Murdoch and G.E., or whoever owns NBC now, but not... who?

Comment · 12 years ago

Yeah, I think there's a better way to alter democracy than outlawing political speech for everybody except approved major parties.

> Require candidates to provide clear answers

And the enforcement mechanism is...?

Comment · 12 years ago

You're the one claiming there's a huge body of research disproving his claims. Your link upthread points to stuff that supports his argument and other stuff that counts as weak evidence against. Nowhere is there anything remotely like disproof. You can also find evidence (e.g. in http://cmdept.unl.edu/drb/Reading/overtime2.htm from the link above) that how you structure your work and rest periods can improve your production. After all, somebody doing office work 60 hours a week with some regular exercise is probably going to outperform somebody like me, who's fat and doesn't exercise. I certainly outperform myself on days that I walk to the office instead of driving. There's clearly some variance involved in individual employees' age, health, height, diet, and attitude, so it should be obvious that you can't just talk about averages over the construction industry and apply them to programming, and to all programmers, with the degree of certainty that you hold.

Comment · 13 years ago

"Right to work" laws are not what you think they are.

Comment · 13 years ago

> All sovereign states--be they allies or rogues--have a legitimate claim to and expectation of privacy where their internal dealings are concerned.

They're governments. They don't have any rights and as local monopolists of violence certainly don't have any expectation of laxity in others' vigilance.

Comment · 13 years ago

This is crazy. Hire engineers that can talk to non-technical people, but then have one of these engineers interview non-technical people to make sure that non-technical people can talk to engineers? But the engineer can already talk to non-technical people, so that wouldn't work!

Comment · 13 years ago

It would be a good idea to make the phone screen more rigorous. Use some etherpad clone-du-jour and have them write code in the phone screen. This way you'll filter out the bozos more efficiently.

You shouldn't expect somebody hired for an entry-level Java position to even know Java. I mean, at least if you're trying to hire somebody who'd be good, they'll have experience in other languages, and the cost of them catching up on Java is miniscule compared to the cost of them catching up with your codebase, with being a professional programmer in general, and it's certainly less than the cost of searching for somebody who's not quite as smart and talented but has better Java-specific knowledge. If you find somebody who has weak knowledge in _everything_, they might still be okay, but if you find somebody who has fairly good knowledge of other aspects of programming (be it another language, or data structures, or HTML or web programming or some protocols and such) then it's a sign that they're not dumb and are worth considering. You should be comfortable simulating how quickly they'd pick up Java when starting.

Edit: Of course, there _are_ a lot of fresh graduates who are scrubs that can't code, signed up for the video games or the money, and thought they'd just focus on grades and they just suck in general. People with general Java background knowledge who just don't know that Java has exceptions are one thing, people who mess up the exception-throwing syntax or forget about checked exceptions are another. What kind of person are they -- did they go to film school or did they go to "films"? People who went to film school will know what their professors told them to know, people who went to films might not have looked at Java specifically but will have a bunch of other knowledge about programming that they looked at outside of class.

Comment · 13 years ago

Um, no? Having more experience with programming would make things easier to understand.

Comment · 13 years ago

If the T440s comes out soon enough, the Thinkpad T440s with FHD IPS screen.

Otherwise... personally I'd go for the T431s. Macbook Airs don't have enough key travel.

Comment · 13 years ago

It doesn't matter whether it's a majority. A third of people is a large proportion.