Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21251573

Points: 99

# Comments: 101

I like to use darker film in side windows, but it makes hard to use the side mirrors at night, I would love to replace them with cameras.

Things like night mode and anti-glare would be pretty cool as well.

I saw /etc/passwd and asked my boss how to decrypt the passwords. He told me it was a one-way encryption, so the login program would just encrypt the password you provided and compare to the encrypted value. He went on explaining the old crypt algorithm and even made a bet I could not guess his password. He said it was related to a movie.

So at 17 I was hooked and started studying the sources. In the end I just patched and recompiled the passwd binary to store clean text passwords in a hidden file. Later I learned this was called a trojan horse.

And even now, 30 years later, I remember his face when I told the movie was Citizen Kane and his password was "rosebud".

Thank you Miguel and Gorgonio for teaching me about C and Unix! This knowledge paid my rent for 3 decades and I still love the job.

[1] http://www.internationaloffice.unicamp.br/english/teaching/g...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232

Every beginner underestimate how much salesmanship it takes to run a successful freelancer career.

There is a neural pathway that triggers this to occur in about any human, under the right circumstances - just watch anyone doing something that demands deep focus or concentration combined with fine motor skills.

For example, watch a musician or a someone playing videogame and you can identify motor stereotypical moves in the facial muscles (specially tongue/mouth/jaw).

The stereotypical moves in autistic persons tend to be very characteristic and are easy to spot if you have a trained eye.

So don't worry about moving your toes in patterns or jiggling your leg while you are coding, it is perfectly normal.

* GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season.

* GMO that only works with some other supply available only from the same provider (think of a car that only works with gas from Ford).

* Patents on living organisms: a farmer should be allowed to plant the seeds they grew in their own farm, produce hybrids and so on, without paying royalties.

* If GMO strains get accidentally cross-pollinated from a neighbor farm you should not be on the hook for it.

Python lacks tail call optimizations and recursion dept is limited to ~1000, so if your algorithm is not O(log n) or better you may have to convert from recursive to iterative (there is a recipe that makes conversion trivial) but other than that I'm content with its FP-style features.

Composing SQL expressions using this library instead of using string interpolation/concatenation has several advantages:

* DRY and composition * safety * portability (if you have switch the underlying DBMS)

Often the result is as good or better than my raw SQL. The fact that Python has an amazing REPL makes the process pretty much like testing queries in the database prompt but with less cognitive switch between languages.

In the end it is a matter of taste, but I have to agree with parent posts, SQLAlchemy raises the bar for other ORMs.

I guess it will be like Antarctica, where several countries made territorial claims[1] over it, many of them overlapping.

The UN's 1984 Moon Treaty[2] is dead letter - it has never been defied but is defunct in practice as none of the most prominent space-faring nations have ratified it.

If someone settles in the Moon you can refute their claims over territory there but what else can you do? Set an embargo? Send a military force and try to kick them out? Nuke them? Someone with knowledge and resources to colonize that desolated rock in space is not an adversary to be underestimated...

[1] http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/people-in-anta... [2] http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/moon

Since Project Apollo in the 1970s it is known that all the materials needed for manufacturing photovoltaic cells are present in lunar rocks and dust. Not saying it is an easy engineering feat, but the raw materials are there.

With a space elevator in the moon you can use raw material from the moon to assemble huge stations and ships in space.

In Brazil employers have to pay a fine if they fire a worker without a "fair cause" (~ 3.2% over the sum of all compensation paid to the employee while they worked for you), so the longer someone worked for you the more expensive it gets to fire them.

When I look at any market where the labor code is excessively protective, I see high unemployment rates specially among the young - Brazil, Spain, France[3]... I don't know about causation but clearly there is a correlation between employee over-protection and unemployment rates. I think it is the law of unintended consequences[4] in action: the legislator intention was good (protecting employee) but the net result is negative.

[1] https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2017/12/brazilian-labor...

[2] https://www.capital-ges.com/an-insider-view-of-the-brazilian...

[3] https://countryeconomy.com/unemployment

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences

    from __future__ import annotations