News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

showdead

Re:C++ Papercuts on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @03:38PM (#37327808)
Re:Apple doesn't care about album cover art on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @07:05PM (#26654311)
Re:’I’m Not a Cat,’ Says Lawyer Having Zoom Difficulties on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @05:27PM (#26095669)
Someone tracked this down to a piece of software called Live! Cam Avatar: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56010156
Re:Implement an emulator for a fantasy CPU in JavaScript on Monday August 24, 2020 @10:04AM (#24260746)
> x86 is notable in that you can cause a branch or jump without calling a branch or jump instruction.

I'm curious what you are referring to here. Are you talking about CMOV? Or INT/SYSCALL/SYSENTER? Or just the ability to trigger a fault handler? Or semantic games like push followed by ret?

It's because they have the "American dream" of rising to the top. https://youtu.be/xxD9nGL3NLY
Re:Chrome 77 Breaking Drag and Drop Events on Friday October 11, 2019 @09:51AM (#21224328)
Not disputing this, but the UX of navigating to a bank's website using Chrome on XP and getting redirected to a "Download Chrome" link when there isn't a newer version for your OS isn't a great experience either.
Or just turn off javascript for the site, and the paywall doesn't happen.
Re:Cooling a house without air conditioning on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:55PM (#20779595)
Less effective at cooling, more effective at dehumidifying (it seems there is a presumption that dehumidification is roughly linear with operating time.)
Re:In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] on Friday August 16, 2019 @09:53AM (#20715126)
I think this is what is being referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052
Re:Known packings of equal circles in a circle on Friday August 02, 2019 @11:23AM (#20593691)
For N=104, if you look at the PDF and zoom in, you can see the blue circles have a line rather than a dot. Admittedly, it is hard to see why the blue circles do not have enough freedom to move slightly away and become magenta (particularly the one on N=108).
> So they have a duty to select a CEO who doesn't enable the unnecessary waste of corporate money on optional taxes.

Waste is one of a very short list of categories that are considered something no one wants: https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...

Re:High-Pressure Processing of Food on Monday July 01, 2019 @02:15PM (#20328132)
That might be true, but the reason for this recommendation is because botulism spores can exist in honey and the systems (mostly gut bacteria, from what I understand) of infants are not developed enough to deal with it, unlike older children and adults.

AFAIK, spores have not been observed in US-sourced honey, but that is no guarantee.

> I'm not sure I've ever seen the design you're referring to

I think this style is what was being referred to: https://www.amazon.com/Stansport-Aluminum-Scout-Canteen-1-Qu...

This particular item does not appear to be well made, which lends credence to the difficulty of finding a high quality product.

I basically gave up on twitch after it stopped working on the Xbox 360. The app just shows thumbnails but never streams. It doesn't work right in the browser for me either, probably due to running an old version of Chrome, but it used to work, and the browser hasn't changed, so I blame site "upgrades" (read: changes that break what was previously working.)
Re:Why do airlines still mislay 25M bags a year? on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @04:37PM (#20108870)
Nothing. It made the news in 2009 in Phoenix: http://bobarno.com/thiefhunters/airport-luggage-theft/
Re:The Bloom Clock on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @10:50AM (#20095559)
The paper talks about dynamic networks where nodes are being added or removed. If m and k are fixed, does it set an effective upper bound on the number of nodes? How do you address the possibility of multiple nodes having colliding hash values?
If you have array @foo in perl, $#foo is the index of the last element of the array, which is just the size of the array -1. So if @foo is undefined, $#foo is -1.

Using a variable instead of 'foo' is a symbolic reference, so this is effectively using the symbol table as the associative array. This means that this solution also gets it wrong if your file contains a line that matches the name of a built-in variable in perl. That would be tough to debug!

If your file contains

    This is the first line of the file
then during execution of

    ++$#$_
the result is the same as if you had written

    ++$#{This is the first line of the file}
So the variable @{This is the first line of the file} goes from undefined to an array of length 1, turning $#{This is the first line of the file} to 0.

Incidentally, this is why the snippet fails to work for a line repeated more than once: for each occurrence of the expression, the value returned is in the sequence -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... so it is only false for the second occurrence.

Using preincrement instead of postincrement means the values returned are 0, 1, 2, 3, ... which means that inverting the test makes it false for every occurrence after the first.

It is much older than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell,_book,_and_candle

I believe in contemporary use it has become associated with witches, and I have seen it used as a general "occult" reference.

Re:Most Wasabi Is Fake [video] on Thursday March 21, 2019 @12:19PM (#19454080)
The popularity of lobster is generally attributed to it being canned and served on the railroads (thinking that they could get away with serving cheap meat to customers in the midwest unfamiliar with it) and then people developing a taste for it.
Re:Counting Bugs in Windows Calculator on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @12:38PM (#19380424)
Calculator is interesting in that there is a physical button on (many) keyboards to open it. Ironically enough, I encountered a bug with the Windows 10 calculator that caused it to crash upon opening: the window would draw, then a second later vanish.

Turned out that it was due to something profile related: re-registering the Windows App Store fixed the issue. Yes, that's right, a dependency on the app store can prevent you from running Calculator.

I remember getting a free polo shirt with the AltaVista logo embroidered on it. I don't recall the specific circumstances that led to being sent a shirt, and I wore holes in it so I no longer have it, but it really was superior to the alternatives before Google came along.
The US does have a television network called PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) which is a non-profit organization although it is only partially government funded (they generally ask for donations from viewers about once a year). The quality of the reporting is usually pretty good, but news is only a subset of their programming, so it doesn't compare to something like the 24-hour cable news channels.
Re:I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived on Monday October 16, 2017 @10:26AM (#15483382)
The term comes from the history of firefighting: http://www.firehydrant.org/info/hist-fp.html
Well, there is this approach:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdint.h>
    
    #define FIZZ(x)         (x & 0x0924)
    #define BUZZ(x)         (x & 0x0210)
    #define FIZZBUZZ(x)     (x & 0x4000)
    #define NONE(x)         (x & 0x34cb)
    
    void fizzbuzz(size_t n_max)
    {
        uint32_t x = 1;
        for (size_t i = 1; i <= n_max; i++)
        {
            if (FIZZ(x))
              printf("fizz\n");
            if (BUZZ(x))
              printf("buzz\n");
            if (FIZZBUZZ(x))
              printf("fizzbuzz\n");
            if (NONE(x))
              printf("%d\n", i);
            x <<= 1;
            x |= (x >> 15);
        }
    }
    
    int main(int argc, char **argv)
    {
        fizzbuzz(100);
    }
It's less costly than integer division, and I'm not sure it's what you had in mind. The output here still duplicates the strings.
Re:What I believe II on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @02:52PM (#15021184)
I am reminded of this comic strip every time this comes up (despite it being from about 7 or 8 years ago): http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883
Apparently you can file separately in order to not take spousal income into account, then file an amended return to make it joint instead without recalculating the debt relief. Seems a bit shady to me, but apparently not uncommon.
Re:The Matasano Crypto Challenges on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @12:08PM (#8168403)
Glad to see that this was not dropped! I did notice that matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/ has been returning a 404 for the past month or two.

Will there be a way to automatically submit / advance, for those of us that would like to do them without encountering spoilers?

Re:The Matasano Crypto Challenges on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @12:04PM (#8168367)
That doesn't really do much for those of us with backgrounds that do not include Javascript / web development.

Such as embedded processors, just to use an example that might be exactly the type of people who would find this challenge extra interesting.

Full disclosure: I did several of these, but the browser issue is probably what kept me from doing more. It did not run in my (admittedly outdated) browser of choice, so I had to do some Chrome wrangling, which was the opposite of fun.

Re:Candy Crush creator abandons 'candy' trademark efforts on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @02:04PM (#7306845)
This is one of the points where British English and American English diverge. Candy in the US is the generic word with the identical meaning as what in the UK is just called "sweets". Same thing as trousers / pants, although not quite as amusing.
Re:Stripe CTF Writeup on Friday August 31, 2012 @03:22AM (#4458679)
I got to level 6 before I quit. I'm certain I could complete it but I could not justify spending any more time on it.

In contrast to their previous ctf, this time the contest itself seemed less technically robust. The site didn't work in a browser without javascript support (elinks). On level 6, the "social network" app did not work with the (quite old) version of Chrome I have; Opera could post a single message after loading the page, but after that it would silently fail to post any further messages.

I still have the shirt from the previous ctf. Dealing with disassembly was a lot more enjoyable than trying to learn jquery.

Older »