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I love how they sell it! It’s like a nineties commercial (at least how they ought to have been.. I wasn’t really around or cognitively sound back then)
Are you tired of your existing compilers?
Want fresh new language features and better optimizations?
Make your day with the new GCC 8.1!
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This is why my preferred method for crossing intersections with 4-way stop signs is to go straight through the middle.
Sounds like a cool guy!
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Does it really classify as a vulnerability tho? Isn’t this just a bad UI design choice?
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The question of ethics or morals seems to come up occasionally. The smog-gate issue, self driving cars killing people, etc. I’m a programmer so I feel both sides of this issue e.g. While my animal brain wants blood for the programmers that wrote the code for these things, my thoughtful brain would never want to be blamed for something “out of my control.” The banality of evil by Hannah Arendt is a good read, it talks about how normal people do terrible terrible things. While I think you can point to high profile individuals like Uncle Bob, Bret Victor, etc. that would have the luxury of authority and context to be “ethical.” I think your general run of the mill programmer would not. Also this ethical conundrum is not isolated to programming. Other fields that seem to have issues are Medical and Financial off the top of my head.
At a prior job many years ago, I was shocked at the terrible practices used to “secure” a password. It was some home-grown pseudo hash that was just terrible and trivial to break. After I had updated that code to use industry standard techniques, a request came in from LEO to crack the password of a device used in a case for a drug dealer (drugs are bad, mmmmkay). I happily cracked the password and got a letter of thanks. I was young. Today I would probably refuse on moral grounds but I wonder, given the same situation of negligently bad password securing practices, what I would do.
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I’ve seen that one actually, it’s really good! I also really liked a similar German documentary about the ethics behind modern investment banking from the perspective of someone who worked at Deutsche Bank.
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Ethics and engineering oaths have come up several times on lobste.rs. For reference:
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xfbs
4 months ago
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link
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Announcing a single C++ library manager for Linux, macOS and Windows: Vcpkg
While I love the fact that Microsoft is trying this, I somehow don’t believe that it will be a major success. There is already conan, buckaroo and hunter, and your OS’s package manager of choice. But how many people actually use these? And even if you wanted to use them, you might not be able to, because not all are supported by all build systems. What build systems, you ask? Well, you could use make, either with pkg-src directly or with the higher-level automake? Nah, scratch that, better go with premake. Or maybe try out ninja combined with meson, like all the other cool kids? Most people seem to use and dislike cmake. And the really daring are trying to bolt a module system onto C++. I think C++ is beyond saving because it has too many moving parts, and Microsoft won’t fix that. But then again, that’s probably not their mission, anyways.
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This is pretty much how I feel. The first thing I thought when I saw this was, “another one?”
I applaud the efforts to give C++ a unified environment, and the fact that it’s coming from Microsoft is much more of a blessing for the tool than anything else could be. Since C++ (and C) have existed as sort of decentralized languages compared to something like Ruby, Rust, or Python, and the fact that there is so much C++ code out there (legacy or otherwise), I doubt that the landscape will change very much within the next decade or two.
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Finally! I am so elated about this. Gone are (will be?) the days of
0.0...Float::INFINITY. You will be missed, IEEE 754-1985\infty, but I think deep down we all thought you were a little… hackish?
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Is it my dialup or is the site loading a little slower than usual?
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I just ordered AT&T@Home service and it is 1337! Dump that dial-up!
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Are you looking to host your mail on your own domain? If so, I’ve had pretty good experience with zoho, which has servers both in the US and the EU which I find convenient. Also great is uberspace but it’s more involved — you create an acount, you pay as much as you like (minimum 2€ per month), and you get an SSH login (pubkey based), they have scripts to automatically set up a mail server with your own credentials, IMAP/SMPT, spam filter enabled, and they take care of updates and all that. Great service. Uberspace is hosted in Germany, you can hook up your own domain to both sites, and I think they have like 10GB each of mailbox storage.
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I use uberspace as well and really like it! The setup is easy enough and is documented quite well (if you know German…). They use qmail which makes custom rules for retrieving and processing incoming mail quite easy.
The 10 GB storage they offer is for the entire account that is on their server, so it’s shared across all accounts that are served on that server.
They also offer a trial month where you do not have to enter any personal data and the payment model is pay what you want, which I personally really appreciate.
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Now if only it were of any use to most developers, as it seems to be tightly coupled to macOS.
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While I know plenty of developers who are on Windows or Linux, I think implying it’s of no use to most developers is a bit of a stretch. The overwhelming majority of web developers I know use Macs, as do most of the mobile developers I know. They combined may be a strict minority, but it should still easily get plenty of use.
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Web and mobile developers are irrelevant here, and a minority. Okay, you have a bias from what you see. But most programmers are on Windows, and a version for that alone would help Linux developers, too, because of WINE. I just see these people battling with git and this is a solution that will be completely useless to them. Maybe next time.
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I do wonder if someone has useful stats on what kinds of systems programmers use… Like, if
npm,cargo,rubygems,pip, etc. would keep track of what platforms people are on when they install packages (although the numbers would probably be a bit skewed, since a decent chunk on package installations happen on server systems on which no development is being done).It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a good amount of people on macOS, simply because there are quite a number of amazing macOS-only developer-centric apps. I mean, do you think Kapeli would sell as many Dash licenses if there was hardly any developers out there using the platform? At least me, Dash has almost revolutionised my workflow.
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That feeling when you scroll through your tabs and you see a red banner set in Comic Sans MS… Not a bad article tho.