First there was NaCl which was a subset of x86 code leveraging x86 features to sandbox the execution. This x86 subset was produced by a special toolchain and could be verified before running.
Then PNaCl came along with a platform-independent bitcode format based on LLVM IR, which was translated to host's native code in the browser.
Then WASM (also platform-independent) came along striving to be a multi-vendor solution. Unlike the other two WASM directly targets the JavaScript engine. It started out as a serialization format for JavaScript AST.
Adding to this, PNaCl relies heavily on Chrome's sandbox, so any third-party implementation of PNaCl would involve re-implementing large swaths of Chrome. It's not as portable as you'd think. WASM was designed from the ground up to not depend on any browser's implementation.
Don't forget that the LastPass chrome extension has been tricked in the past to extract passwords from arbitrary domains. It's still important to use your brain when clicking links and invoking LastPass's autofill functions.
That's why I love and recommend password managers to all my friends / relatives. Not only does it help prevent phishing but it promotes stronger passwords.
Likewise - if Firefox doesn't automatically fill in a password that I expect it to, something strange is going on. (Especially now that Firefox automatically uses http credentials for the same page on https, which removes the one other common reasons for this to happen.)
While I also don't like sites breaking autocomplete, LastPass' "Show matching sites" dropdown only lists accounts valid for the current domain. So a very similar protection is available even without autocomplete.
If VR technology doesn't advance fast enough to solve its current issues (nausea, lack of DoF and gravitation) in the near future, we will likely enter a period of stagnation like the AI Winter.
You don't even have to give feedback in an interview. Just let them answer your question and if it's too detailed, write it down and look it up later. In fact, Google usually doesn't give back any feedback during or after their onsite interviews.
I hadn't heard of this. I just spent the last hour setting up my own federated server and playing with some clients. This is pretty great! A lot like Slack in terms of UX, but without the corporate walled garden.
To answer that question for yourself just requires reflecting on the benefits of open source vs. proprietary software.
Also, in this particular case, Matrix also appears to be a well thought out platform for decentralised communication, one that is likely to be flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple different forms of communication.
On the contrary, I would say that enterprises should take the risk and use such projects. They likely have enough capital to hire the correct people (e.g. one of the core devs) when a problem shows up.
Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
Ack. Sadly, enterprise procurement is all about avoiding blame in case something goes wrong.
Another issue is contributing to open source projects. I know a case where a customer's in house developer had to wait two months to contribute a few lines patch to a open source project because legal objected. They never dealt with that situation before.
Enterprise procurement is all about avoiding things going wrong, avoiding blame is a distant second. When every hour of downtime costs hundreds of thousands, the ridiculously expensive, 24/7 SLA supported enterprise solutions don't seem so overpriced anymore.
That's how at least one of my start-up experiences wound up. The large enterprise entity who'd committed strongly to the product ended up bringing much of the development effort in-house, for several years.
You've got to realise that for enterprise software, there's $10 sales, $100 sales, $1,000 sales ... and then $1,000,000 sales. At the top level, you're looking at entities who have the resources, and occasionally the motivation, to bring product entirely in-house. It might not be their first choice, but it's an option, and quite likely something they've already considered when negotiating for services.
Can't say I would want to depend on being able to hire one of the few devs from the core team as my contingency plan in a high risk situation. Precisely because they are fat and have a lot of money to throw around - that leaves room for inefficiency and getting squeezed by Oracle and the likes in exchange for covering their ass.
Didn't the same problem happen to the CloudFlare with LuaJIT where they would like to hire guys that worked on it but couldn't ?
Sure but they are still trying to hire someone with direct experience working on LuaJIT and failed to recruit prominent community members from what I read around here.
What else can they do? With the new wave of AI and automation there will be no jobs left for people with below average intelligence. You will need more and more researchers and programmers but not everyone can do those jobs.
> more researchers and programmers but not everyone can do those jobs.
Research is suited to fairly scientific minds but I think programming is totally something anyone who's interested can do.
Software development continues to modernize and become more accessible. If you're motivated, I'd say you can definitely do programming. And the best part is that it applies to virtually any existing job.
It's easy to think so if you've been programming for a while, but try to teach programming to kids (or adults) and realize this really does depend on some inherent ability and/or interest (and this is even with a self-selected group who chose to go to a programming course).
You probably can get most everyone programming at a basic level, like we did with reading and writing, by requiring it at a primary school level.
However, a lot of these people will be about as useful as professional programmers as the average person is as a professional author.
Some people cannot think analyticalally enough to maintain the state of a program in their head. This is why freshman CS classes can see retention rates in the single digits. You adapt your brain doing it over a long enough time, and when you start doing it early in life you evolve your brain to suit the task, but for anyone who lacks the critical thinking and logic to think programatically the later in life you are the less likely to be able to ever internalize it you get.
Yeah, less stimulating is a bit vague. I was thinking of the effects that playing video games has on the reward center of your brain - the creation of dopamine... more related to addiction than outright stimulation I suppose.
I also think art can include things like being a chef, barista, baker, barber, and brewer, distiller, wine maker; not just the things we typically call art. Things that are in more demand than paintings.
Except all those jobs are going away with the automation revolution. You can't have an economy based off the equivalent of getting carriage rides in central park where its just a frivolous humor to experience human powered food production or a haircut done by a barber.
Don't think automation will get rid of these jobs - have you seen the cronut? Don't think a computer would have been able to derive that creation... (not sarcastic)
Also, as we create more time, we'll have to spend it on these luxurious that currently seem frivolous.
The lack of gender diversity in tech is NOT a problem. Women choose not to become software engineers for the same reason they avoid all STEM fields.
This recent push to make everyone a software engineer is such an obvious attempt by companies to push down wages. You will be wasting your spare time trying to reduce your salary.
If you would talk with some actual women in tech, you would learn that many women choose not to become software engineers (and choose to leave at 2x the rate of men) because it is often a shitty environment for them.
You would also learn that plenty of people are working on making a more inclusive industry for reasons that have nothing to do with pushing down their own wages. I'm one of them.
It's often a shitty environment for men, too. Now the question is: Is it really that much more shitty for women, are there other factors at play for them leaving (or not joining in the first place), or a combination of both.
I'd say the latter: The environment is a bit shittier on average for a women and therefore should be improve to be equally shitty for all, but there are other factors at play here too.
There's also a distinction to be made between "things are shitty for everyone, and men tend to handle it better" and "things are shitty for women in particular because of anti-female sexism".
Like, construction work is also a shitty environment that's shittier for women. There's significant danger and hard physical activity, and for men are generally better able to handle that. The amount of women in construction may also be driven down by sexist behavior as well - I'm not familiar with how working in that field is.
If men are more willing to put up with shitty work environments because it makes them more money, that'll both create male-dominated fields and be a problem that anti-misogyny campaigns are useless against.
female construction worker and FOSS hobbyist here.
I've been to tech conferences and do residential construction for a living. I'm a member of the local VFD. I'm familiar with predominantly male environments. I wish there were more women doing the things I love to do, but oh well.
Predominantly male environments are much more verbally and physically confrontational than mixed ones, in my experience. So my presence is really awkward. No one feels comfortable ripping on the new guy if the new guy is a new girl who's a bit shy. Sometimes the awkwardness dissipates, other times it doesn't. If it doesn't, I leave. So I suppose that this is one reason why predominantly male environments tend to stay that way.
It's always felt like more of a group dynamics thing than pointed sexism when I've experienced it.
One more thing: just because a job is physical doesn't mean that men are better at it. This attitude is extremely annoying to me as it directly affects my day-to-day life. I train 10-15 hours a week, and I'm stronger than the out-of-shape old guys. This doesn't matter. They know so many tricks to make the work go faster. Work smarter, you know?
I'm not sure if there's any data on female construction workers and danger/workplace accidents, but I'm actually confused by your assertion that men are better able to handle danger. Like, I don't understand what that even means.
By "better able to handle danger" I meant that they're more willing to do risky behavior. Like, part of doing a dangerous job is deciding that it's worth doing, and men are more likely to do so in spite of the risk.
Essentially, I'm blaming part of the construction work gender disparity on the same thing that explains why only 14% of motorcycle riders are female.
>just because a job is physical doesn't mean that men are better at it.
Sure. I'm definitely not saying that women can't or shouldn't do physical jobs. Averages and distributions exist, though, and testosterone is a hell of a drug.
As for the danger part. It sounds like men are socially forced to accept danger and risk, I doubt most men really want to do it, but they are forced to be providers while us women are socially forced to be caretakers.
> I'm actually confused by your assertion that men are better able to handle danger.
When the poster said, "significant danger and hard physical activity, and for men are generally better able to handle that", they may have been saying that men are generally better able to handle the physical activity, and not necessarily the danger too. English is ambiguous about grouping clauses sometimes.
It's both, but "men are better at handling risk" is a really weird way of phrasing "men are more willing to engage in risky behavior". And that sentence was originally just about the physical activity, and then I realized that the difference in risk tolerance was also a contributing factor and I should mention that as well, and the phrasing vaguely worked properly so I kept it.
Sure, life is terrible. Sure, the patriarchal system we are embedded in is bad for everybody. But again, if you want to know what actual women actually experience, the right way to approach that isn't boldly stating your own answer. Try asking.
Unfortunately very few people have the experiences of both men and women in tech, which is what is necessary to get a comparison from someone who actually knows how much shittier it is as one vs another.
I'm not seeing why that's necessary. Historically, patriarchy is pretty obvious. Women were forced into specific roles for thousands of years, and that was clearly still happening during the lives of many people now in the workforce.
So I'm comfortable just taking women at their word when they say they're still experiencing problems. I don't need to carefully measure the exact relative degrees of shittiness. Worst case, I will listen to them and solve some problems that turn out to be for everybody.
"Mainly, most women have an easier way out by getting married so they don't have to do any hard work, physically or mentally. How do you think they survive otherwise?"
I'm not sure you actually have spoken to that many women, have you?
Your rush to dismiss very well documented problems as coming from “a die-hard feminist SV hedge fund kid who blows everything out of proportion because of political reasons” suggests a far more likely explanation: none of the women you've talked to feel comfortable discussing their frustrations with you because they're afraid of sharing that hostile rejection with the potential for negative career impacts.
Exactly this. If I want people to be honest, I have to create a context in which they are rewarded for honesty. This is especially true if I am asking them to do me a favor by spending time to educate me.
> Mainly, most women have an easier way out by getting married so they don't have to do any hard work, physically or mentally. How do you think they survive otherwise?
For majority I interviewed, it provided the women an extra job on top of a 9a-5p or crazy-scheduled job with pay varying from crap to good. A very, small number coild trade one for the other. On rare occasions, roles reversed with the guy being a stay at home dad or using a well-off woman to avoid full-time (or any work lol).
I worked in public-facing positions enough to talk to hundreds to thousands of women about their jobs, life, and such. I'm even in the South where higher percentage supports so-called traditional families where marriage is important. Vast majority of women I've met both work and got married. Many of them work ridiculously hard. A subset are stay at home mom's or married for money. They're less common to rare dependinv on area I was in.
So, my areas are where your statement had better chance of being true but was still wrong and sexist with a sample size of 1000+. Most women try to have a good job where they get stuff done with desirable pay and environment. Like the men do.
"This recent push to make everyone a software engineer is such an obvious attempt by companies to push down wages. You will be wasting your spare time trying to reduce your salary."
absolutely agree and it is obvious.This is simply about trying to expand the pool of qualified individuals to drive down the salary.
Then PNaCl came along with a platform-independent bitcode format based on LLVM IR, which was translated to host's native code in the browser.
Then WASM (also platform-independent) came along striving to be a multi-vendor solution. Unlike the other two WASM directly targets the JavaScript engine. It started out as a serialization format for JavaScript AST.