Viewing profile — MichaelGagnon

Agreed. Also, be aware that many non-expert attempts to develop compression algorithms turn out to be flawed. However, it sounds like you've developed a compression pre-processor s…

As far as pop-culture goes, I think Clarissa still holds the cake for female programmer characters. Acid burn (from Hackers) is a close second...

From the article: "Should the mantle of 'creator' lie with the program or the programmer?" Strangely enough, this was the exact dilemma that Clarissa faced in in Episode 29 of Clar…

Thanks; upon re-reading the comment I see it now

I disagree. Node.js and client-side JavaScript should treat security issues differently because they face different risks. E.g. A DoS against client-side Javascript is not a big de…

Augmented reality for the web

Bit Torrent. It's how Blizzard distributes their games. Although your game needs to be sufficiently popular for that to work...

Add together these three statements the author made: (1) The vulnerability report exists in the "shadowy ground between the reports that are clearly crackpot and the reports which …

If you really wanted to attack their vuln-investigation processes, you would simply let them conduct business as usual since it seems they don't know how to triage potential vulner…

Those two "reported vulnerabilities" are clearly not vulnerabilities. Whoever spent 5 days investigating these "vulnerabilities" should be embarrassed instead of blogging about it.…

And from the HN article "intellectual honesty requires bending-over-backwards to provide any evidence that you might be wrong." The article is so close to a direct Feynman quote th…

The problem with the Python documentation is that it does not adequately explain the value of it's more obscure features (such as coroutines). And since coroutines are obscure in g…

New business idea: Setup proxies in Switzerland. Customers pay a subscription to download pirated content from their Swiss account. From there, you can transfer the customer's data…

My first impression was that the combination of lossy compression and transparency would give WebP better traction (because before designers would have to choose between JPEG and P…

For hackers, the best thing about ADHD is hyperfocus, which is a lesser-known, but common symptom of ADHD. Hyperfocus is the tendency "to focus very intently. [...] At times, the f…

"The following degree fields are not considered qualifying: --Degrees in Technology (Engineering Technology, Aviation Technology, Medical Technology, etc.) "

Depends on your definition of ethics. * Consequentialism ethics: make sure the benefits to users outweighs the harm to them (in your judgment) * Deontological ethics: do the morall…

When I read the title I was expecting an article on augmented reality

"Proof" as in mathematical proof. As in, it proves a particular mathematical model of the universe is consistent---but says nothing empirically about the actual universe. Am I miss…

Agreed. Employers compensate you based on their estimate of your __future__ contributions to profit. Asking for compensation during a fire sale is not negotiating; it is begging.

These results are unsurprising to me. But then again, my startup is building a cloud-based mobile-malware detection service to address the inherent limitations of anti-virus on mob…