521–530 of 671 posts
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I think the generator from xkcd sounds pretty good. https://xkcd.com/936/
For ages I remembered this as 'battery-horse-staple-correct' but then I see loads of people saying 'correct-battery-horse-staple' so now I think I'm the one who is wrong. I wonder which way round is actually the right way to say it?
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> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? I certainly have. Interestingly, one was the same "sanity check" program for my internet connection, because of the same ISP you mention. Amazing coincidence...I don't think. :-)
I've written one too, if you count a simple shell alias for ping google.com Comcast "service" has probably driven the creation of more trivial internet connection test programs than any college course in the world.
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I always find those annoying to copy (we use a lot of shared credentials, like when the customer gives us 3 accounts with different permission levels to pentest an application with) and it also simplifies the command to not have to specify all those symbols. You can also avoid the whole `fold` thing by just telling `head` to give you a certain number of -c instead of a certain number of -n. (Then again, you were prop…
Using head -c 16 will show an ugly '%' at the string end when not piped.
Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…
I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest. I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up wi…
Since you know web development, maybe install TamperMonkey and start "fixing" or improving websites you use regularly. You can often make a significant difference to your experience with a few lines of code written in a few minutes (changing/adding CSS rules, making links visible instead of hidden in dropdown menus, reordering/recolouring things, presenting information in a more sensible way, adding shortcut keys, converting static tables to DataTables, etc.). Over time some of my user scripts have grown to many hundreds of lines, and even been adapted to be essential components of workflows of me and my colleagues. They make my job/life easier dozens of times a day.
(Most of these are for internal websites or idiosyncratic to my needs, so there's no point in sharing them.)
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Using head -c 16 will show an ugly '%' at the string end when not piped.
On which OS? There it is piped, but I can't make it display a "%" any way (why would it?). I'm on Linux, using head from GNU coreutils.
Sure... my most recent one is an app for the sport of Boxing. It's what I tinker on when I'm tired of coding on business software stuff. It's getting to be a pretty cool too. It has a "Scorecard" and database for boxers, and I've taken my first (shallow) dive into "Sports Analytics" to predict a winner of an upcoming bout, and it's working pretty good too.
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> This is common among a certain type of person and unheard of for everybody else. I suspect the venn diagram of that is very close to the venn diagram of hn readers and everybody else. I think "doesn't everyone here" is implied there.
Yeah, that's the thing I think you imagine is true but actually isn't. I'd guess that the majority of HN readers don't do this, assuming they represent average technical employee across the industry. They probably _could_ if they needed to.. but I bet they don't. (Just based on my sample of: all the people I've worked with).
That would be the disagreement then I think: you and him have different models of the majority HN reader. Based on my experience in the industry and on hn, I also don't think the typical hn commenter represents the average technical employee. Perhaps the typical hn reader does, but then I have a lot less information about that group.
I don't think it's right to say he's "out of touch" for an off the hand remark like that, even regardless of this discussion.
e: also, there is a poll option for hn posts, it might be interesting to find out more about who does/doesn't do this.
I just cannot deal with enterprise installations of Jira and their forced insanity/slowness. So now I get to define my own fields, categories and icons, query everything locally, and I never have to worry about it again.
Oh, and if I were using atlassian cloud I wouldn’t have lost all my issues :P
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Please don't use $RANDOM or $((RANDOM)) or standard `shuf` for password generation. These RNGs are not cryptographically secure. Use input from /dev/urandom instead. Modulo operations like these are another thing to avoid. To get equal chances for each word, the simplest thing to do is e.g. do wordlistlength = 10e3 randomnumber = os.urandom(1) * 256 + os.urandom(1) while randomnumber > wordlistlength return wordlist[…
I'm curious. What kind of attacks do you open yourself up to if you use $RANDOM in this situation? Also, why do we avoid modulo operations?
$RANDOM provides 15 bits of randomness (32768 possible values) from an LCG[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator
LCGs are multiply followed by add followed by modulus, which is usually implied by a mask or a native word bit length rolling over. You should observe that multiplies have patterns in the lower digits which an add will only offset, and the modulus will only throw away high bits rather than mix them back in to the low bits. Consider the low digit in multiples of 7 (what you'd get picking a number between 0 and 9 inclusive via modulus):
7 -> 7
14 -> 4
21 -> 1
28 -> 8
35 -> 5
42 -> 2
49 -> 9
56 -> 6
63 -> 3
70 -> 0
77 -> 7
84 -> 4
91 -> 1
98 -> 8
105 -> 5
112 -> 2
119 -> 9
126 -> 6
133 -> 3
140 -> 0
But again, don't use an LCG for generating your password.
[1] I looked at the source. Bash looks like it tries to use random(3) if it's available, otherwise it seems to use this, which doesn't have an add:
x(n+1) = 16807 * x(n) mod (m)