Best posts made by Mason_Wheeler
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RE: In other news today...
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
Failure right out of the gate, as expected:
After finding a number of flaws in software used by many end-users while researching other problems, such as the critical "Heartbleed" vulnerability, Google decided to form a full-time team dedicated to finding such vulnerabilities, not only in Google software but any software used by its users.
This is not pen testing a network or an organization in any significant way (pedantic dickweedery says that you could generically exploit a flaw in some software that someone was using, but that's not targeting an actual organization).
It's not "targeting" anyone; they test basically anything and everything they can think of to see if there are security holes to be found.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@mott555 said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@xaade I'm "I have a Yahoo email address because Gmail didn't exist yet" years old.
Me too! We must be twins!
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RE: In other hostile takeover Tweets...
@cvi said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Mason_Wheeler said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
It's allowed because there's a clause in the issuing documents for the shares that says it's allowed.
TIL. Are these kinds of clauses common?
I think so. It's common for them to exist in case they're ever needed, but not common for them to actually be invoked.
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RE: D&D thread
@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
You just gotta build in an exception for when Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein did a similar thing, and did it better than you, at least if you're not also a professional actor. And Travis Willingham might even be the best actor of the bunch.
My personal favorite was when Grog scored a natural 20 on some completely random knowledge check and then played the entire thing perfectly in-character.
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RE: Having problems with unit testing philosophy.
@Gąska said in Having problems with unit testing philosophy.:
You don't need clear-box testing if you have black-box unit tests. I mean, what do you expect to gain from it if you already know that every step in the pipeline works flawlessly in isolation, and black-box integration tests tell you the whole process is okay as well?
And this is what I mean about the harm unit testing causes. It gets you into the mindset that "you already know that [the code] works flawlessly."
No, you don't. If all your tests pass, you know that all your tests pass, nothing more. You don't know that the tests are covering every relevant case. You don't know that the specifications you're testing are correct. And you don't know that the test code itself is free from bugs.
I've opened up a library that boasted of 90%+ test coverage and 100% on all critical paths, and found serious bugs within the first 5 minutes because I tried something the author just never thought of. But his tests told him everything was flawless...
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RE: D&D thread
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
At the game club, one of the players in the short Shadowrun campaign I ran there some years ago remarked to me that he liked me as GM because I don’t say “no” to things players want to try. Apparently, the other GMs he’s played with do that when they feel a player’s actions will screw too much with the story they have in mind. I just tell them to roll some or another test, and then let the chips fall where they may.
[as Matt Mercer] "I'll allow it. Go ahead and make a [whatever] roll..."
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RE: D&D thread
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@Carnage Honestly, I don't plan stories. I plan carefully-balanced situations. Houses of cards, stacks of dominoes. It's all wired so that any outside disruption (as PCs are wont to do) will make it all start snowballing down. Somewhere. Somehow. Where it goes is totally unpredictable, but it will be a fun ride getting there. Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
I learned this after my first groups took my plots and ran at right angles to reality at the first opportunity. No point in doing more than about a session's worth of detailed planning at a time--the rest of the planning time can be used to build the whole surrounding world in more clarity so that when they inevitably go somewhere you don't expect, there's stuff waiting for them. That way you get a reputation as being able to predict everything, even though you were actually totally blindsided.
See also: Darths & Droids
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RE: Semi-quasi-unofficial unhelpful comments
@boomzilla On the contrary, I would consider "this approach has a lot of problems including opening security vulnerabilities in your software, and therefore should be abandoned entirely" to be an extremely helpful comment if I were on the receiving end of it.
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RE: D&D thread
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
The gnomish engineer, Moon-man, is the one responsible for maintaining the constructs that make the town work. He's totally sane, except that he's building rockets to get to the smaller moon, where he believes that there are endless waves of beautiful, scantily-clad gnomish women waiting for him. His inventions tend to the...dramatically unstable.
So in other words, a perfectly typical tinker gnome?
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RE: Semi-quasi-unofficial unhelpful comments
@Arantor said in Semi-quasi-unofficial unhelpful comments:
Perl's RE engine is bastard fast even in pathological cases
It doesn't particularly matter how fast it is when you have, for example, a case where a linear increase in recursion depth causes an exponential increase in execution time.
(2^N) * x
grows unmanageably huge very quickly no matter how small of anx
you start with. -
RE: Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon
@loopback0 said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@topspin said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@cabrito said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@topspin said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
Passwords aren’t hashed before being sent over the net?
Ok, I know you must be but....
Not at all. I don’t see how more hashing makes anything less secure, and I never said only on the client side.
User enters
password
-> sendH1 = hash(password)
over encrypted connection -> server computesH2 = hash(H1)
and storesH2
in the DB or compares it to the DB value, respectively. (Add in salting as necessary)That way the server never sees the real password even temporarily (even though for this site and all with the same scheme
H1
is effectively the password) and doesn’t need to deal with arbitrary input. Anything that’s longer than expected gets rejected immediately.How is this better than sending the unhashed password over an encrypted connection?
Not only does H1 become the effective password (so now anyone intercepting it just needs H1 which they can use instead of password later) but the client knows the hashing mechanism which makes it easier to attack.Because the point of not letting someone get your password for a site isn't really not letting them get your password for that site. It's not letting them also get your password for all the other sites you use the same password on. And assuming that two different sites don't use the exact same client-side hashing method, this could help there.
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RE: Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon
@PleegWat said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@jinpa said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@dfdub said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@Luhmann said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
@dfdub said in Update: the new admin/moderation team and changes discussions will begin soon:
megathreads
Isn't this a lot to do with and interfacing ...
I always thought these megathreads were created to break Discourse and piss off @end, who liked to have unrelated discussions in separate threads.
What was he banned for? Looking at his most recent posts (2015), they don't seem that bad.
It's coding horror. He self-renamed and self-banned.
Oh, is that who it was? I somehow missed out on a lot of that drama, and the name @end has always made me think of someone I knew on another forum waaaaaaaay back in the day who went by "end" and was best known for being really laid back but having a habit of using weird, archaic words all the time.
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RE: Discussion of NodeBB Updates
@error said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
trying to push a rope.
?
It's a common metaphor for approaching a problem from the wrong end. If you want to move a rope in one direction, you can't push on it; that won't do any good. Instead you need to pull on the other end of it.
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RE: Update on Administration & Community Changes
@apapadimoulis said in Update on Administration & Community Changes:
@DoctorJones that's some good feedback, thanks!
As @loopback0 mentioned, the icon/avatar is the most prominent thing about a topic, so I mentioend it b/c it seems like a very simple solution to differentiating topics from a UX perspective;
[Megatopic]
in the title also does that as well, as I'm sure any number of other things we could tryDoesn't the post count already identify them well enough as-is?
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RE: The Future of "Garaging"
@apapadimoulis said in The Future of "Garaging":
@Rhywden's reply was pretty inflamed (bad mood today?)
Today? YMBNH.
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RE: RPG: The End War
@HardwareGeek Panapos isn't much of a taxonomist, but this thing is obviously weird! It's built basically along the lines of a humanoid being, but it appears to be sexless, and rather than the red blood that all mammalian life seems to share in common, this bleeds noxious, purple, corrosive fluid.
Its corporeal form is clearly animated under wholly unfamiliar principia magicka. Likewise, the large one failed to vanish or dissipate when its summoner died. As bizarre as it may sound, it's worth considering that the attackers may not be of this sphere!
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RE: Moar Cooties
Has anyone else been experiencing sporadic server cooties for the past few days?
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RE: 📧 The Official Spam Emails Thread™
@Luhmann It would be amusing to get one of those, as I don't actually have a webcam.
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RE: Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot
@Benjamin-Hall said in Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot:
It may have been popularized by FP folks, but it's separable from FP as a paradigm.
See also: LINQ. Like the popular JavaScript books meme, it gives you "the good parts" of FP without the overwhelming mountain of trash that FP cultists all too often try to drag along with it.
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RE: Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot
@LaoC said in Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot:
@Gribnit Yeah, I didn't mention that point but I probably should have: there's little demand for Erlang anymore because the stuff that Erlang would be really good for has already been written.
Don't go full Francis Fukuyama.
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RE: RPG: The End War
@HardwareGeek Thad appears to be quite dead, of a broken neck.
He's carrying:
- Standard army-issue chainmail armor.
- Standard army-issue longsword.
- Standard army-issue shield.
- A pouch containing a ration of jerky.
- A waterskin.
- A pouch containing 30 GP, 26 SP, 73 CP, and three common dice.
- A key ring holding 3 keys. Two of them fit the now-useless locks on the chest and the prisoner cart. The third is in a different style, and was probably of personal relevance to him.
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RE: WTF Bites
@topspin What you're showing here sure looks like a plug with holes visible and a connector with pins visible. Are there pins on the other side of the connector?
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
What's "Left 4 Dead?"
I don't remember "Left 2 Dead" or "Left 3 Dead".
He's on second.
Who?
Filed under: No wait, you’re right, it’s what
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RE: WTF Bites
you go and science that, sure. I'm going to as for leg cuffs, and extra wrist cuffs, 24 carat preferred, but 18 will do. yeah. more chain to. make sure that all my restraints have the proper amount of chain so that I have freedom of movement withing the area I'm aloud to be in, but also that I cannot move quickly with the chain because of the weight.... That will prevent me from going far fast if I make a run for it and i can be easily reacaptured.
How much burden weighing your body down can you actually carry before you have serious difficulty walking? Because if you want
millions of dollars worth of gold
well, at today's spot price, $1 million in pure gold weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 pounds.
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RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
@Bulb said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@levicki said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
TL;DR -- Motorcyclists are the worst of the worst.
No. Dangerously driving assholes are dangerous no matter what they ride. Though there might be higher percent of them between motorbikers—they are already living dangerously by getting on the road without a protective steel cage around them, so the group is self-selecting the less risk averse.
A guy I knew bought a motorcycle several years ago. He rode it once, then it just sat there in his garage for years and years; he never had much time or interest in taking it for a ride. Eventually he sold it and used the money to buy a big-screen TV, and he gets enjoyment out of that every single day.
Smartest thing I've ever seen anyone do with a motorcycle.
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RE: Advanced Trolly Logic
@PotatoEngineer You're right, that was in Forward The Foundation. (But not in I, Robot, which is probably why I couldn't remember it being there.)
I've never read Robots and Empire, but that wouldn't surprise me too much.
One thing I do remember is that one of the stories involved a challenge to prove that a specific character was a human being and not a robot masquerading as a human. One character argued that, without taking them against their will and cutting them open, there was no good way to tell, because the behavior of a robot conforming to the Three Laws is indistinguishable from that of a good person living a virtuous life. So it kind of makes sense that at some point it would have to deal with the age-old question of using violence for virtuous ends, when it's the only feasible way to prevent far worse results.
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RE: Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot
@Bulb said in Functional programming rah! OOP nah! Or how to know you're a zealot:
What were they migrating to?
Kafka in one case, cloud queues in the others.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@boomzilla Didn't CBOE already do that a couple years ago, immediately before Bitcoin's price had a massive crash it never recovered from?
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@boomzilla Because you posted the article...
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RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
@Rhywden said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
Yes, there were actually assholes who were blocking this lane deliberately,
This is bad
or who used the lane to turn around and drive back to the nearest exit.
This is very very bad
who drove behind the ambulances
...why is this bad?
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RE: WTF Bites
@levicki said in WTF Bites:
You need to learn how to spot jokes.
It's not a joke if you have to say it was when confronted.
@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
with not one, not two, but three (apparent) death scenes. None of which seem necessary to the plot.
I guess you never watched the trailer for The Last of Us 2 then?
I don't know about other people growing up on this planet today, but I'd say that, for me, breaking little girl's elbows with a hammer isn't necessary to the plot either, and I cringe to even think how the mocap for that was recorded.
You know, there's a difference between survival horror and platformer for kids. Developers should keep in mind what genre/style/mood their product is in. Breaking boundaries may be fun, but doing it too hard, or being ignorant about it looks terrible.
Deponia is a great example [spoilers ahead]
It's a funny, wacky adventure game, light in tone, with likeable characters, set in a ridiculous cartoony world. Everything about it says "fun" - this mood is consistent throughout the game, and then at the end it's all ruined by a bad ending.Creators defended this choice by saying stupid stuff like "life doesn't always give you a happy end" and "happy end would not be art", proving that they don't understand the genre.
Oh, they did this in sequels too, 4 times total. Four great games with four terrible endings, because some schmuck wants to be "an artist".
Just out of curiosity, have you ever played Eversion?
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RE: WTF Bites
imagine if in Super Mario, the princess wasn't in the 8th castle either. It certainly would be a bummer ... but after already having that happen 7 times before, could you really say it was unexpected?
Yes. Being told affirmatively that the princess is in another castle implies that there does, in fact, exist a castle which the princess is in. If that castle isn't in the game, that would be a massive violation of expectations. (Especially for the time period!)
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RE: WTF Bites
@Mason_Wheeler said in WTF Bites:
Just out of curiosity, have you ever played Eversion?
No, why?
Just wondering. You should try it. It's a Mario-esque platformer about a cute flower-person-thing who has to use his reality-bending powers to rescue the princess. It's a lot of fun.
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RE: In other news today...
@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
This is one of those "does biweekly mean every two weeks, or twice a week" questions for which there is no satisfactory answer.
The answer is, "stick an 'every' on the front." Bi means two, so bi-weekly is something that happens every two weeks. Twice a week would be every half-week, or semi-weekly.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Tsaukpaetra Did you add Linux to the supported platforms in the Store Page Admin?
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@Vixen said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Of course it put a shortcut on desktop
Well there's your problem. you still have
Show desktop icons
enabled.
Remove that check and all will be right with the world.
Why is this a thing that even exists? What possible benefit could it bring
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RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
@djls45 said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
@sloosecannon said in Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition:
70 near Washington, PA?
No, approximately this stretch of 422 near King of Prussia.
Oh hey, I know that road construction! Has it moved all the way down to King of Prussia now? When I was there, the big bottleneck started right before the Pottstown exit, and was a part of my daily commute.
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RE: UI Bites
I was held hostage by bad UI the other day. A program had automatically updated itself and put up a dialogue of the "Program has been updated. Computer needs to be restarted to finish the install." with the options of OK and Cancel. I press cancel. "System needs to be rebooted for the changes to take place." Sure, fine. Not a critical program. It can wait until I shut off the computer for the night.
But no. Upon pressing OK it just put up the first dialogue box again. Pressing Cancel this time just made it reappear. Keeping on pressing Cancel just brought it back infinitely. So I had to reboot the computer if I wanted the stupid thing to go away. Grr.
CTRL-SHIFT-ESC is your friend.
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RE: Random thought of the day
...so, does this explain why the Time Stone is green?
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@JBert I even saw that and upvoted it!
It was over 3 years ago now, though.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
borked
boxenDoes seeing this jargon in a news article bother anyone else or am I just ok boomering myself?
I've seen Raymond Chen use the term "pwned" in serious articles, to refer to compromising a computer. So...
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RE: WTF Bites
@topspin Why would the OS do that, and not the graphics card manufacturer?
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RE: WTF Bites
@Mason_Wheeler said in WTF Bites:
@topspin Why would the OS do that, and not the graphics card manufacturer?
Because our Windows Terminal Servers are virtual machines without a dedicated graphics card.
BTW, why is it the hardware manufacturer‘s job when complaining about windows, but Linux‘s Job when complaining about your sound problems?
It's the hardware manufacturer's job when discussing specialized 3D acceleration libraries that require purpose-built 3D graphics hardware to work in any efficient way. Sound, by contrast, has been pretty much a standardized, solved problem since the 90s.
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RE: WTF Bites
And no, I’m not going to use DirectX when OpenGL is platform independent. Or, as Mason put it, pretty much standardized.
Yeah, that's the really nice thing about OpenGL: it's available everywhere. (At least... everywhere where you have an actual video card.) And screw any iDiot phone manufacturers who want to undermine its universality.