It was surprising to me too! But reflecting on it more closely, most performance isn't about "faster" in a literal sense of "more instructions run per time", but about carefully choosing how to do less work. The security property here being "history independence" is also in a way stating "we don't need to, and literally cannot, do any work that tracks history".

It's definitely an interesting approach to performance, essentially using cryptography as a contraint to prevent more work. What properties do we need, and what properties can we ignore? The question becomes if we MUST ignore this property cryptographically, how does that affect the process and the related performance?

It certainly feels like it may be a useful perspective, a rigorous approach to performance that may be a path to more improvements in key cases.

https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Lunatic_Fringe

This level had a circular hallway ring around the outside that had two full rotations around without intersecting, using the 'build' engine's ability to separate areas by their room connections that also drove the 'room over room' technology which was groundbreaking at the time.

It made for fun multiplayer, and the illusion held well there. The central chamber has 4 entrances/exits if I recall, and you would only encounter two of them in each loop around the outside.

I recall building a toy level while experimenting with the engine that "solves" the "3 houses with 3 utilities without crossing" puzzle using this trick as well.

https://0.30000000000000004.com/

I helped my current employer make this transition and it was similar to the description in the article. Controlling database change in source was foreign to them.

If you had an error that leaked private information, it's worth an investigation. If it made it through despite controls, that's understandable. If they find you failed to do analysis on the risk to users privacy, if you failed to have controls in place, if you didn't code review or test the code, then you have made specific choices that harmed users. That should be criminal.

We need to take software engineering seriously as a discipline. We have the potential to do more wide scale aggregate harm than any structural engineering collapse. We need to start acting like it.

http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/01/hawaii-distributed-phony-im...

It's a common enough UI issue to be immediately clear to a professional how it happened though.

The \1 is from the original puzzle, and refers to the value of the first (capture group). I ran into this issue while filling out the puzzle. The \1 is required to 'propagate' the value in that square to other places. The puzzle is ambiguous without this fix.

Thanks for the pointer, I've added the note in the comments. Hopefully the puzzle is editable.

Lovely puzzle, and it's a great quote. :)

That makes the ethical questions very challenging to address. Personally I feel more 'ok' with hackery for the items that aren't available retail, but I hate 'pay to win' in games as well. It's hard to articulate how I feel about the situation. I think the article is spot-on that making these available in DLC packs or something as well would clarify the situation a lot.

There is an excellent write up of how this works and why it works from a former congressional aide: https://qz.com/836737/fomer-congressional-staffer-twitter-ti...

Take action!

Write your senators numbers on a note by your desk, put them in your phone as contacts. Add your house representatives as well. When you hear about an important issue, make a quick call. Ask them to represent you on upcoming issues. Thank them for their position on issues you support, let them know you are disappointed in them for things you oppose.

It didn't take long to realize how incredibly dangerous that was, and leave.

Banks should provide API access for services like this because it mitigates significant security issues.