William Edwards

That was an excellent book! I got the book and couldn't put it down. Luckily when I got to the contest at the back I found myself with a couple of weeks of summer holidays with Pascal and my 286 and no internet connection. I cracked the manual ciphers with computer programs. I started on the Engima cipher, but did not create an accurate Enigma machine (the drawings in the book were incomplete and I didn't know that and had no internet access). A couple of years ago I chanced upon the book again and set about solving the Enigma part. https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/145830743193/my-attack-on-… Fond memories! :D The book is warmly recommended.

I wish more people considered this alternative when recommending the usage of queues etc. I always remember of this post: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18065079081/cogs-bad

Magic is wonderful when it works right, and painful when it goes wrong. I will absolutely agree that the magic built around speedy crud apps that handle 80% of what a web developer does making it only take a small fraction of time is a wonderful thing for productivity. The problem with the magic for the 80%, is that the remaining 20% takes up the remaining 80% of the time. With the first 80% of the delivery in 20% of the time, the final 20% taking 4x longer because of the lack of understanding of the magic gives no advantage in the end. Thats if everything goes well. If the 80/20 rule fails, you get the ninety-ninety rule ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule ). RoR lets one build crud without understanding what goes on beneath the ActiveRecord. RoR is great when there is low complexity of the code and it is easy to follow the data through the pipes. Once it goes beyond that, adding complexity to that with the spooky action, highly declarative style that RoR encourages it can be painfully difficult to do - and something that far beyond what the 'write crud in 30 mintes/hours/days' classes offer. Beyond that, with the failure to understand the before and beneath, one gets the impossible to debug bugs and security holes that lie within libraries that have been imported ( https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/43394068341/rubys-principl… ).

Actually, neither of Google's methods require physical access, it's just easier if you have physical access. SMS is just not secure. That's a general fact (it's not encrypted, it travels over many networks in the clear, phones can be cloned, google voice can be intercepted, and then there's alternative methods like this: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/24949768311/i-know-someone-… But then there's the App. The App runs on a smartphone. Smartphones are computers. Computers run in software, and are subject to two flaws: network access and software bugs. Consequently, if you download the wrong app from the App Store, you could be installing a rootkit which can control your entire phone - including spying on your Authenticator App. Like i've mentioned elsewhere here, these rootkits have existed for years, and often it doesn't even take installing an App - plenty of exploits have been found in mobile browsers and other apps, not to mention the possibility of exploiting the OTA upgrade features many vendors and carriers build in. A plain old hardware token is not vulnerable to network or software attacks. You have to physically steal it or read its display in a narrow window of time to circumvent it. The only ones for Google (that I know of) require a complicated tutorial set-up or a device plugged into the computer, and like I mentioned before, it's not worth it for me to do either. Separation of accounts means squat if your…

I could swear you've posted this exact comment before. Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-spam-posts-… https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparing_automati… https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_trainergenera… http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-have But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste? I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.

I now have something new to link to whenever someone posts something suggesting that a "pipe curl to shell" command isn't insane! http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/42921614369/omg-rm-rf-in-a-…

Indeed: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/24949768311/i-know-someone-…

Original Discussion from it's first appearance on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3906143 Also, blog post from presumably the author about how the idea hadn't really taken off: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/21266287229/giving-up-on-gi… and discussion of said post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852413