Viewing profile — alexjeffrey

in my experience, if you can grab a couple of not-too-underpriced gigs on a freelancing website (my preference is PeoplePerHour as it's less price-war-y) and can get a few regular …

a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator would be nice, too.

no problem at all - thanks for all the hard work you put into the book!

for anyone else wanting to read Elon Musk's story in more depth, I can't recommend "The Engineer" by Erik Nordeus enough. He basically compiled titbits of information from various …

white privilege? don't you mean anglocentricism? the bias would be equally present if Mark was African-American or Asian-American.

we still are - plenty of startups don't even start making money before they're acquired.

truly the most hipster art project of all time. I'd back it!

... and it's impossible to know for sure that a hash is secure against collisions. For example, MD5 was the standard for hashing for quite some time but is considered broken today …

realistically you would want to use a merkle tree to hash the source, to make it more secure against a chosen plaintext collision, but aside from that this'd be a great addition.

it should also be mentioned that Jerry's commentary is _hilarious_ - he's basically the SeaNanners of chess.

but with all the publicity surrounding their actions, will they become more well known which will in fact counteract their star rating on Yelp? My guess is yes.

you say that, but minecraft is worth actual money because it sells a product that lots of people want to buy and has a lot of potential for further attached products (servers, DLC,…

that's just PR - PR companies wouldn't do so well if they pushed stories that showed their clients in a negative light.

these figures are deceptive considering the UK's comparatively-socialist tax attitude. The biggest thing I would point out is that we have nationalised free healthcare for everyone…

I think black triangles are only really possible if you're working on software architecture - that bit when you "go into the tunnel" and are working in purely abstract space comes …

I'm not the parent (I'm GP), but my position is that organic certification is good, but the universal association of "natural = good, synthetic = bad" is only harmful. Yes, farmers…

more importantly, the use of "natural" to describe a product with the implication that it being synthetic would be a bad thing is a fallacy.

your assumptions about cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators (CSPRNGs for short) are incorrect - one of the key requirements of secure random number generation is…

uplink is fun, and considered a classic of the genre. In terms of education, the real thing is more interesting - check out places like hackthissite.org or smashthestack.org for so…

I agree, but the race condition kind of kills it - 2 people editing the same file at the same time.

looks like fun! I've been holding out for a modern retake on the uplink series or some other fun hacking game. one UI thing that came up for me - going through the university pages…

There's a term for this exact phenomenon - Little Eichmann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns This ties into the concept of the "Banality of evil" which plays out prett…

I chose the languages above mainly due to their popularity outside the sphere of silicon valley - you are right that I should have included python in this list, but go and haskell …

but on the other hand, it is better than having unknown security properties like e.g. ruby or javascript on node.js. While node is built on the venerable V8 engine which has strong…

what would you suggest? for all its faults, PHP has seen a lot of hardening efforts over its lifetime and its security flaws are well known and can be compensated for.