kelthan · HackerTrans

2 years agodiscuss

Since the '90s. While the preferred form is '\', '/' was allowed as an alternate path separator.

2 years agodiscuss

What I really want is this induction stove like this but that also has a single gas burner. Induction is great, but there are some things you can't do with it, but it covers 90% really well.

I guess the alternative is to get a portable high-output single burner butane stove that I can pull out when I want to arroser a steak, for example.

kelthan

2 years agodiscuss

This solution doesn't do anything to prevent leaking memory in anything but the most pedantic sense, and actually creates leaks and dangling pointers.

The function just indirects malloc with a wrapper so that all of the memory is traversable by the "bigbucket" structure. Memory is still leaked in the sense that any unfreed data will continue to consume heap memory and will still be inaccessible to the code unless the application does something with the "bigbucket" structure--which it can't safely do (see below).

There is no corresponding free() call, so data put into the "bigbucket" structure is never removed, even when the memory allocation is freed by the application. This, by definition, is a leak, which is ironic.

In an application that does a lot of allocations, the "bigbucket" structure could exhaust the heap even though there are zero memory leaks in the code. Consider the program:

  int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    for (long i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
      void *foo = malloc(sizeof(char) * 1024);
      free(foo);
    }
    return 0;
  }

At the end of the million iterations, there will be zero allocated memory, but the "bigbucket" structure will have a million entries (8MB of wasted heap space on a 64-bit computer). And every pointer to allocated memory in the "bigbucket" structure is pointing to a memory address previously freed so now points to a completely undefined location--possibly in the middle of some memory block allocated later.

There are already tools to identify memory leaks, such as LeakSanitiser https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LeakSanitizer.html. Use those instead.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

How do we sign up for the beta? This provides information on how to install Test Flight, but doesn't provide a link to get an invite once installed.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

The one thing to keep in mind when reading this article is that the malloc/free API was built when many of the issues that are identified in this article (alignment, sizing, etc.) were not issues. Until the early 80's computer memory was the limiting cost factor for most machines, and the memory models were fairly simple. Alignment to something like a page boundary was something that was completely unreasonable/unfathomable, since wasting that much RAM would have been extraordinarily wasteful.

Modern CPUs have more memory built in to L1, L2, and L3 caches than most computers had in total working memory until memory started getting cheap.

I agree with the author that has lead to some "sharp edges" for the API, but that is a normal growth pattern. I'm not saying that the API doesn't have to change, but I did want to make sure that people understand that the creators of the old APIs were not stupid, they just faced different constraints than we do now. And that led to API "shapes" that may be surprising and frustrating to use now, but made perfectly good sense at the time.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

First off, let me give a shout out to the author of the article. It's quite well written with clear support for the answer he provides.

Now back to the thread:

It turns out that most people expect "random" to mean a random selection without duplication (at least until the source is exhausted). That is called a non-replacement randomization: once a song (or comic, or whatever), is played/displayed, that item is no longer considered as part of the pool for future selection. However, that requires saving state for the individual user to save which information has been presented to this specific user, which adds a whole lot of additional requirements for cookies, or account registration, or other things that we all generally loathe.

The fundamental problem here is that most people don't really understand randomness and probability. If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business (see The Gambler's Fallacy[1]). This is not a failure of education, or mental capabilities: it is a fundamental friction with the way that the human brain has evolved.

The human brain is fundamentally a pattern matching system. We look for "meaning" by identifying patterns in our world and extrapolating what actions we should take based on those patterns. As such, we assume that _all_ systems have memory because that's how humans learn and take action, so we generally assume everything else does, too. But truly random events have no memory: there are streaks that appear "non-random" to us, such as multiple tails occurring in a streak during a fair-coin flip. But streaks often occur in truly random data, we as humans just don't expect it.

The existence of the Feynman Point[2] is an example that even someone well versed in randomness and math thought that a string of six 9's appearing in the value of PI, an irrational number, was something worth noting.

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gamblersfallacy.asp [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Not really. It makes it harder, since the warrant would now have to include the cell-provider(s) for your mobile device(s), which would all them to geofence you by tower location or the HTTP headers (which Google could also be compelled to provide). And they would need to correlate the various data to be able to get a rough idea of where you were, as opposed to getting that data in one step from Google.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

And how much would it have cost you to file a lawsuit?

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

If the government is providing healthcare, as it does in many countries, then they have it already.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

I was adopted. I have no idea who my biological parents were or what genetic risks I might have inherited from them. When the doctor asks "Has anyone in your family ever had <fill in the blank>?" I have no answer to those questions without a genomic test.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

There is a difference between genomic data and biometric data: biometric data has a known potential exploit vectors. So, with a picture of your retina, a sophisticated adversary could potentially reproduce your retina to allow access to some secure facility.

Genomic data doesn't have the same risk factors--at least at the moment. I think that the point many are trying to make here is that there may be risk vectors available at some point in the future that aren't known now. A couple of theoretical examples:

* You had to give a blood sample rather than other biometric data like a retina scan.

* Spoofing DNA evidence. That would be very/prohibitively expensive/difficult at the moment, but I suppose could become as easy as 3d printing at some point in the future.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Trying or arbitrating a large number of cases individually is far more expensive than litigating a class action suit. But only if the people pushing the arbitration hold firm, rather than agreeing to the initial settlement offering.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

But having the company update a TOS that automatically removes rights from the consumer, after the consumer already agreed to a TOS that didn't previously restrict those rights is likely not going to hold up in court, either. Especially when the TOS changes were made after an event likely to trigger litigation.

This isn't a case of a minor change to consumer rights in the TOS like changing who would arbitrate a case. It's a significant restrictive change to the rights of the customer in favor of the company. And it was made after a security breach that affected a huge portion of the companies clients which is likely to trigger lawsuits of the form that the TOS now seeks to restrict.

This is clearly a case of attempting to close the barn door after the horse was spotted in the next county over.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Right. Also, the practice of having a sticker on a shrink-wrapped box of software that read "By opening this package you agree to the Terms of Service contained within", where the TOS was inside the box that you needed to open the package to read, was deemed unenforceable back in the 90's. It's the reason that TOS' are now displayed as a pop-up during installation. Not that many more people actually read them before installing the software, but at least they are given the option to.

I suspect that a competent lawyer could fairly easily argue that this "automatic opt-in" is the same thing in a slightly different format.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Yes, from the perspective of any user/consumer of the service. But since they are facing litigation, any lawyer will tell you that keeping your mouth shut until the action is adjudicated is THE best course of action, regardless of what some politicians and corporations may do these days.

The only other thing that they could say would be "We do not comment on matters involving pending litigation." But that's just a longer way of saying "No comment." It's not any more satisfying for the customers or partners understandably seeking answers to what happened, how, and why.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Automatically opting-in customers to a more restrictive TOS is pretty suspect, especially given the timing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that a court would not allow that, given that the TOS was changed AFTER the breach and it's pretty clear that the company is trying to avoid legal issues after-the-fact.

I would expect the court would evaluate any breach under the TOS that was in effect at the time of the breach, rather than under a new (and arguably suspect one) that was put in place after it, arguably in an attempt to "rewrite history".

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

And then saying publicly that they should be "fired" after they take his message to "f*k off" and stop advertising seriously and halt their advertising spend on X/Twitter.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

Wasn't it just last week that he told advertisers that they shouldn't advertise on X and that they should just "F*k off!" and that he couldn't be "blackmailed" with money or advertising?

Now he says if they don't advertise on X, they should be fired?

I'm confused. Though not as confused as Musk is, apparently.

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

I agree it's biased against Musk, but that's the point of the article. Were there specific conclusions that you disagreed with, or just the tone?

kelthan

3 years agodiscuss

I notice that they didn't announce any substantive changes to the actual mobile app. So, it appears that rather than addressing long-standing complaints about the app that lead people to use 3rd party apps like Apollo (that Reddit killed off with absurdly high API pricing) they decided to invest in customized and proprietary fonts and logo updates.

It appears that the app will still have all the same bugs, problems, and usability issues. But the text, logo, and color scheme will be awesome.

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