Viewing profile — ashearer

On the other hand, if they had quietly offered a one-time policy exception before reaching the point of a court verdict, they would have avoided any kind of precedent.

While I can't say how much effect grammar has on thought processes, the metaphors we rely on can be significant. For an example that came up earlier today ( https://news.ycombinato…

This is an example of why the term "sanitize" just brings confusion and leads to incorrect software. If we say "escape" (for concatenation) or "parameterize" (for discrete argument…

On Catalina at least, variable-speed constant-pitch playback is still available, just hidden. Option-click on the fast-forward or rewind buttons to access it. It jumps in increment…

Good to know that AWS is so fast to detect this. If good uses were common—and I'm struggling to come up with them—AWS could suppress the alert for IAM users that were already suffi…

> "Similarly, Uber argued that the industry at large had become more adept since 2014 at protecting private data in the cloud, and that Uber should not be judged for “what a compan…

> Women can handle it in the same way they can handle a cloudy day Going with that, then why create that cloudy day when it would take very little effort not to? And what message d…

My comment went on to say that you don't know ahead of time exactly which tests will prove useful. So you can't just skip writing them altogether. They key point is that if you hav…

If a particular test never finds a bug in its lifetime (and isn't used as documentation either), you might as well as not have written it, and the time would be better spent on som…

The same slide also mentioned supporting JIT translation (for x86 web browsers and Java), so Rosetta doesn't run only at installation time.

Yes, I completely agree in the above case. The JSON input has a well-defined format and input validation should reject it outright. The issue is that when developers hear they shou…

Even the Joel article makes what's arguably a mistake: he says that input from users is "unsafe" and must be escaped on output, while strings from elsewhere shouldn't. That may avo…

The difference is where it's done. "Sanitizing the input" implies that it happens when the value is read, so that all uses of the value are stuck with a single result. "Escaping th…

This sounds good in theory, but I'll give a counterexample. Requirement: Name input box. Implementation: We'll sanitize the input by rejecting any characters likely to be dangerous…

Yes. It's the word "sanitize" itself that misleads people. It creates the mindset that input from users is dirty and must be made clean, and "clean" is "safe" to use in any context…

It looks like a general optimization for tail-recursive functions that assumes they terminate (because not terminating would be undefined behavior). The parameters to the recursive…

Measuring "per participation decision" often makes more sense than "per participation hour" when deciding whether to do an activity. (It could be shortened to "per event", defining…

Immediately below that, the final Excel output is unreadable: it shows the left axis scale ending at 450 and right axis scale ending at 400, with both values corresponding to the s…

One approach that works very well is to keep stored functions in separate .sql files in a directory (I use "fixtures"), and execute them all on each deployment. This should happen …

Then it would become impossible to store future timestamps in a database and have a stable answer to the question, "on what day will this timestamp occur?" Timestamps around midnig…

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A92PMGcquo

It's the electric company charging different rates depending on the brands of your appliances (even if they use the same amount of electricity). They can also charge the brands the…

Please illuminate me. I may be wrong, but I certainly wasn't being dishonest. The fact that you leaped straight to that conclusion doesn't help convince me that you have a particul…

That's the question then--is it the case that any rational interpretation of the polls gave an actual forecast of least 70%, and the NYT lied? The parent seemed to be saying that e…

This is why I don't get usually get involved in political discussions online. Someone who's committed to a position can always bring up new questions instead of responding to the o…