While I fully agree with you that the practice of curling a script and piping it into `sh` is—to say the least—risky, notice that this risk has been widely accepted long time ago. Each time you download an executable file—be it an exe for Windows, apk for Android, a Linux binary, an OS X executable—you're doing the same thing. I'll go one step further: each time you download a free/open source tarball you do not read the code before typing `make`. You make your machine run some code of unknown functionality and only plausible origin.
Arguably, HTTPS is one step forward, however vulnerabilities like the one discussed here make us defenceless. To make matters worse the line of defence based on reading the script works only in the case of relatively short, unobfuscated and unminified scripts written in plain text. It also requires the person who's downloading to have skills which despite being common for this community's audience are not widely spread across the population.
Sure, many projects sign their releases or announce cryptographic hashes of published files. But let's be honest: how many of us actually run `gpg` od `sha256sum -c` to verify them?
Spreading paranoia is not my goal here, however I hope that this comment will end up being thought-provoking.
At the very beginning of the presentation he underlines the importance of the static compiler RubyMotion is based on, yet at 7:30 when he compiles a file with a name error in it the compiler doesn't even file a warning. Such non-existent methods and other similar errors should be caught at compile time if we're talking about solid AOT compilation.
I've been running various flavours of GNU/Linux on my laptop for a couple of years now, with Arch being the most recent one. I find it perfectly adequate for an IDE-less, Vim-centric coding which takes a significant majority of my time spent in front of a keyboard.
I wonder what are experiences of members of the HN community who run Linux on their MacBooks, especially in case of a development-oriented environment. Could you share your opinions about such a setup? Is it worth the price of the machine?
Firsty, comment sections are usually full of noise and it's next to impossible to distill any valuable information out of it. Secondly, don't expect an average person to bother checking for potential malware.
No, I didn't make any comparisons to other baselines. Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts; I'll have to reconsider the results I got in the light of your comment.
I couldn't sacrifice performance (lots of number crunching was involved with costs tight), so, I couldn't pick Python.
PyPy, Cython or Shed Skin might have been answers to those number crunching problems. I'd love to learn whether they would be sufficient for OP's performance requirements. Some benchmarks look promising, for instance this one published in late 2010: http://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/speed-up-your-pyt...
During the previous semester I spent some time building a recommender using this data as a project for a data mining class. It turned out to be far more challenging than I had initially anticipated.
I've used methods known as collaborative filtration, whose goal was to estimate how a given user would rate a given item basing on knowledge of preferences of other users of similar interests. The initial scope included a naïve Bayesian classifier and a technique called Slope One [1]. The latter one is particularly interesting as according to claims of its authors allows to make a very good estimation in a very short time using solely a very simple linear model. The preprocessing is both time- and space-wise expensive though as it requires you to build a matrix of deviations between rated items.
After reducing the data set to a single subreddit and filtering it from users who weren't avid voters I ran the algorithms and after some tuning I was very content to see promising ROC curves and decent AUC values. Models built around NBC and S1 achieved comparable results when it came to such metrics as precision, recall and F-measure.
When I went to discuss the results with the professor teaching the class I've heard "That's indeed promising, but how about comparing those results with a really naïve model which would just take an average of existing votes by a given user?". Guess what: the model built solely using a single call to the avg function was nearly as good as the NBC and S1 models.
Now I understand why the guys from Reddit are looking for external help with the recommender. It's a way less obvious task than it might seem to be.
Have you noticed that scientific organisations participating in the ISS project are promoting a game in which sounds in audible in vacuum? Apparently the heritage of Star Wars et al. is still preventing the industry from marketing space-based games not making physicists laugh. Surely, it won't change soon.
I'm intrigued by the 0.8 GB difference between the x64 and the x86 build. It's even more interesting given that this difference must be caused solely by different machine code, which, by its nature, shouldn't pose a big challenge for compression algorithms. Assuming that 32 extra bits per pointer and a different instruction set aren't enough to generate such such an increase in size, I'm wondering what might be the reason. Extra binaries and portability-related code for for 32-bit compatibility? Any ideas?
It's worth being noted that the latest attacks on government's websites are top headlines on majority of Polish news sites at the moment. Both the attacks and ACTA are being covered on news TV channels and radio. Apparently, taking down government's website is a remarkably good method of raising interest of media.
I'm wondering what would be an effect of moving a standardisation organisation to a software-patent-free country. In such case software patent issues wouldn't be any obstacle for the organisation in their standardisation processes. On the other hand, created standards would be useless in countries where technologies covered in the standard had already been patented.
As a result, isn't it so that software patents in some countries inhibit the development of standards on a global scale? That's troubling.