Firehed

That's a bad code problem, not a PHP problem. Why does this meme continue to exist?

This is a PHP bug: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010511-php-floating-po...

Everything else? Bad code.

And ding your credit history? No thanks.

I would definitely charge back every unauthorized charge they make, and charge it back again if they fight it and win (yes, you can do this, and yes, it does work). It's not worth their time to fight small chargebacks at all[1], and the damage multiple chargebacks can do for even relatively large payments often makes it not worth going through multiple rounds.

Although at that point, I'd consider simply reporting the card as stolen. In effect, at that point it is. Once the PAN is marked as invalid by the issuing bank, those recurring charges should definitely not be able to go through (exception: some sort of wacky bill-pay system that bypasses the credit networks entirely; yes, these exist, although normally go the other way)

[1] As a merchant, your chargeback rate is unaffected by winning chargebacks, and the fee (typically starting at $15, and often marked up) is per-incident. Meaning if the customer fights the charge a second time after you win the chargeback, you're out $30 and now have two chargebacks in your history, not just one. Between the hard costs and whatever the human factor is in fighting the charges, it quickly becomes non-economical to fight them.

Is it unreasonable? I'd recommend Hover too, and also would have used my affiliate link. If I didn't have one I'd still happily recommend them, but if it doesn't cost you anything why shouldn't I get a cut? That's kind of the point of affiliate codes.

Gearman is pretty solid once you have it working, but it can be a huge pain to get to that point. We spent probably two years (on-and-off, of course) tweaking code to get our framework talking nicely to gearman. PHP's gearman-manager library is a little... wonky, and we were seeing no shortage of bizarre APC interference.

Although in this case, I imagine the real problem is portability. Curl is available pretty much everywhere. exec (or more directly, pcntl/posix extensions) aren't in any out-of-the-box installation, and anything that needs to be further daemonized to get up and running (such as gearmand and gearman-manager) are even harder to use in a one-click solution.

People questioned and attacked his intelligence because of his actions, not because of his race and/or gender. I'd suggest that people who want to attack someone for whatever reason will go after low-hanging fruit (being some sort of statistical outlier), and should that not exist they'll have to go after something of actual substance. When your goal is belittling someone, an attack that requires people to actually think tends not to be terribly effective.

And contrary to your suggestion, I've certainly received plenty of harassment based on my body as a white male. Less these days as I refuse to work with people who can't act like adults, but I've taken plenty of crap about my height and physical appearance (I'm 25; lots of "oh, when do you finish high school?" kind of stuff)

I imagine most developers can tell the difference between 'pursuing' and 'stalking'.

Being confrontational also brings the issue to light and may take us one step closer to solving the problem. Simply ignoring the matter (as uncomfortable as it would be to deal with both as a victim and as someone who doesn't want to put their company in a bad light; I can only imagine) quietly indicates that we're ok with this kind of behavior.

I suppose this is one of those "there's a time and place" issues. I wouldn't likely call out such an asshole while I'm on stage (unless this person tried to humiliate me while I was presenting, in which case I'd simply state that's not an appropriate comment for the conference and move on to the next person), but I'd certainly escalate[1] the issue privately.

We need to look into some sort of zero-tolerance[2] policies for this kind of thing until the message that this isn't okay is clearly understood. Certainly if I'm hosting or attending a conference and witness this kind of behavior, I'll be going out of my way to get this person removed from the conference and will also bring it up with their employer.

[1] In the "I'd like to speak with a manager" sense, not throwing a loud tantrum. [2] Not that I generally support zero-tolerance policies, or find them effective. But I think the concept is directionally correct; any attendee making another attendee (including speakers) feel uncomfortable or unsafe should be removed form the event. Maybe they get one strict warning; it depends how obviously offensive they were being.

Are you writing this for yourself or to share? If the latter, optimize readability for people who don't understand regexes.

As for commenting the end of loops - that too just improves readability, especially in long functions. If your editor doesn't show invisible characters, it can be easy to lose track if some indent is part of the 'i' loop or the 'j' loop, for example (yes, that can indicate a bigger problem, but that's not the point. I'm talking about real-world code, not idealistic academic nonsense)

$3000 is quite low in my experience (depends on your processing volume; I've seen high tens to mid hundreds of thousands of dollars) - although reserves typically aren't applied as 100% of your transactions until you meet them. Normally it's filled slowly over time, say 1-5% per transaction until the reserve is met.

Moreover, you generally won't get it back until several months after you stop processing, since that's when the real risk of chargebacks goes away. Depending on your contracts and agreements, the timeframe can change significantly, including having several smaller payouts.

I skimmed the PDF and didn't see what you're referring to; however, I did see it explicitly point out the ineffectiveness of "security" questions.

It's a trade off between that and allowing some random stranger to transfer your money if you get up and forget to lock your computer. Our first alpha didn't have the auto-logout and by far the most common piece of feedback we got was that we needed it.

Why have speed limits at all then? I've heard anecdotes of professional drivers getting out of massive speeding tickets because they know how to handle a vehicle at that speed (and presumably had the good sense not to be driving way faster than traffic if there even was any) and its certainly possible to get a speeding ticket when traveling under the limit if conditions do not permit.

Seems to me that they should be treated as good-weather guidelines (legally; that's already more or less the case in practice), and focus on the people driving recklessly - weaving in and out of traffic, going 10mph+ faster than everyone else, tailgating, etc.

Uh, no - this is more of a "don't execute code in a textbox" thing.

Likewise.

I got a similar message several months back, but that wasn't part of a larger leak; apparently some website I'd used a while ago had been compromised and I was using my throwaway password on Twitter at the time. Suffice to say, it's using a real one now - fifty-some-odd characters of random garbage generated and stored by 1Password. It's never been used anywhere else, so getting this email a second time just now was quite a shock (this time, my reaction was "really guys, again?" rather than "wtf?")

To their credit, they caught the first instance crazy-fast (my password had been reset automatically within about five mintes of a rogue tweet, though not before a friend texted me about it). This time I didn't see any activity at all, so I assume it was more proactive.

I'd still like an MFA option, especially with how infrequently I actually log in to twitter. However, I do like the "check your OAuth grants" page you're taken to after changing your password.

My understanding is that ntpd corrects clock drift by replaying milliseconds consecutively, not by actually jumping back.

However I can't remember where I read that and could be totally wrong.

@ is extremely slow.

    @$arr['key']

is the same as

    $er = error_reporting(0);
    $arr['$key'];
    error_reporting($er);
    unset($er);

Probably more importantly is that the internal errors are still being raised, there's just additional comparison logic within the PHP engine to suppress them internally.

No more or less than Cake, Zend, CodeIgniter, ...

Heck, the second Google hit for "php mvc framework" for me was a 2009 guide to writing your own (talk about not getting the point of a framework). There were two more pages in the top ten for PHP MVC framework comparisons.

What lack of separation? Don't take this the wrong way, but have you ever actually tried to use PHP in a non-web context? Running "./foo.php" is just as easy as "./foo.py", "./foo.rb", etc. All of these complains seem to come from people that have never even tried to do this kind of stuff. It's damn easy.

If you echo HTML, you get HTML. If you echo binary data, you get binary data. JSON, XML (including SOAP bodies), text, nothing at all, file i/o, direct socket connections, exit codes - all are supported equally well. The only thing vaguely related is the HTTP headers that you get for free if you're running it behind a fastcgi module (apache's mod_php, nginx/php-fpm, etc).

I'd say it started closer to making C more accessible for web programming (no fussing with pointers, memory allocation, bounds checks, etc), which incidentally makes it really easy to present content. It's also the reason for the inane naming conventions in lots of the "core" stuff.

I strongly disagree with your implication that it's only useful as a presentation layer, however. Some quirky syntax doesn't at all make it an incapable language; the real problem in my eyes is there's no one go-to framework for MVC work, a la Rails or Django (there's no shortage of choices, but that's not necessarily a good thing).

I'd be more concerned about the PPC ads leading to a 500 error.

I imagine he means the ability to deploy code to prod at will, not full access to their database.

Indeed. I think the best correlation may be that if someone is already inclined to commit mass violence, they may be able to improve their technique for practicing murder with a violent video game by studying various reactions by human and computer players.

This, of course, is equally true for watching any violent movie, and even just the news these days. But don't let that get in the way of some good sensationalism.

Sounds like the precise idea behind the Do Not Track header. No idea if MixPanel respects it; I'll let one of them answer.

magic_quotes has been deprecated for three and a half years, and widely understood to be a bad idea for around a decade.

If you don't check your configs when moving to a new host, you get what's coming to you.

That's a developer incompetence problem, not a PHP problem. If python or ruby was as trivially easy to get running (read: preinstalled everywhere), then they would be the lowest barrier to entry and have the exact same problems.

That tells us nothing, except that TC copy and pasted some content off a blog. Unless they're quoting an email from Square or Keith that at least confirms its his blog (they are not), then it's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical here.

You're pretty close to the mark - at least for a company doing that much payment volume. Maybe closer to 1.8% or so. There's dozens of variables (debit vs credit, issuing bank, network, international, chargeback rates, etc...) so it's hard to say with any reasonable degree of certainty.

Definitely the right way to think about it - lawyers (or network technicians) as cost-saving tools, rather than direct expenses.

Hire the $2600/hr guy and be done in ten minutes because of his fifteen years experience and deep knowledge of the system; spend $433 very quickly. Pick the $50/hr rent-an-intern and you're down for a day while they're googling the fixes. Spend about the same amount, but avoid the losses from 7+ extra hours of downtime.

Time is money, after all.

Same thing with an after-hours/emergency call to a plumber. Yes, you'll spend twice as much - but that's nothing compared to what it will cost to repair the structural damage to your house because your toilet overflowed and you ended up with three inches of standing water soaking into your everything.

Works great for cigarettes.

I think the point was that Jobs was working with the teams as a contributor more than a dictator. It very specifically pointed out that Jobs' ideas were decoupled from his role as CEO (as were everyone else's) so there were just lots of ideas, and the best ones stayed around while the rest were thrown out.

Perhaps Jobs started that process, but I'm sure it still exists with him gone.