I have interactive firewalls like OpenSnitch running on most of my desktop OS's. I like to see what is going on with my machines' network connections to learn about networking, infosec, and to have have some peace of mind.

Example workflow:

1. Get a firewall notification of a new incoming connection to some process running on my machine
2. If no DNS entry exists and only the IP address is provided, then I google the IP
3. I find something like https://ipinfo.io/74.125.20.189
4. I make a decision as to whether allow/deny based on the ownership info which I found in step 3.

Aside from trusting the particular site presenting the ownership info, how reliable is this information regarding IP ownership?

For example, if an IP came back as "Google" could it really be a GCP instance running a command and control server?

Another example, I know that large corps own big blocks of IPv4, but they must lease these IP's out to whomever, right? I imagine there is some wild-west market for these with little accountability?

Are either of these scenarios realistic? If so, is my entire workflow for "do I trust this IP" pointless?

Hey ~, I'm trying to get a programming job. I don't have a degree (I may go to college, but if I do it'll be in a few months), and little work experience. Do you have any tips that could help me have a successful job search?

Here's my resume (somewhat anonymized). I tried to focus on experience I've gained from creating open-source projects to show the skills that I have. I've made sure that all the projects listed have demos, screenshots, usage instructions, etc. Any advice on how I could improve it would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Some of you have read the Typesetting Markdown blog series (https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/). The plan was to finish the last two parts with Annotated Text (basically markup for Markdown) and Figure Drawing (MetaPost); however, people have asked for a post on Markdown to EPUB, others have asked for high-quality PDF theme templates using ConTeXt, and some have requested rendering Markdown into HTML.

Within the realm of Markdown, digital documentation, typesetting with ConTeXt, R, externalized interpolated strings, and bash scripting, what would interest you for the next post in the series?

(Please flip through the blog series to see the topics that have been covered.)

It'd my understanding that C has stuck around in the UNIX world for so long, nearly half a century, mostly due to the inertia of legacy code.

If you could snap your fingers and magically port/fork the entire stack of open source codebases to the language of your choice, which would you pick and why?

What are you coding? Or are you reading a CS paper?

and of course, have you read SICP today?

                             ___-------___
                         _-~~             ~~-_
                      _-~                    /~-_
   /^\__/^\         /~  \                   /    \
 /|  O|| O|        /      \_______________/        \
| |___||__|      /       /                \          \
|          \    /      /                    \          \
|   (_______) /______/                        \_________ \
|         / /         \                      /            \
 \         \^\\         \                  /               \     /
   \         ||           \______________/      _-_       //\__//
     \       ||------_-~~-_ ------------- \ --/~   ~\    || __/
       ~-----||====/~     |==================|       |/~~~~~
        (_(__/  ./     /                    \_\      \.
               (_(___/                         \_____)_)

I've been slowly learning python for some months already. I used the Python Crash Course book from No Starch Press, it teaches the basics and then goes on with some projects with pygame, matplotlib, etc.

However, I feel that my Python skills aren't very good yet, and before learning to use libraries I would like to have a better command of the standard library.

I have been looking for some book with projects or, even better, challenges using just the standard library, but haven't found any good ones. Most of them either are for absolute beginners, or use additional libraries, or are very technical and without focus on practice.

Do you know of any good book or resource with challenges or projects that don't depend on additional libraries? Or, do you have any idea for a project or challenge using just the standard library?

Thanks in advance!

Can be something current or ancient, and if you've really got an axe to grind feel free to drag in Windows or macOS or other proprietary operating systems.

Personally after using i3 for around half a decade now (though I switched to sway about a year ago) everything else I try just seems to add friction.

Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should definitely install homebrew so that I can have a real package manager like I've got on Linux.

I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool little way to get myself to write more often and hopefully improve my writing, especially when it comes to technical subjects.

Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers working, I'm now looking to figure out how to deploy this to production. I'm not a DevOps or infrastructure guy, my bread and butter is software, and although I've become significantly better at deploying & provisioning Linux VPS's, I'm still not entirely confident in my ability to deploy & manage such systems at scale and in production. But, I am now close to running my own business, so these requirements are suddenly going from "nice to have" to "critical".

As I mentioned, in the past when I've previously developed applications that have been pushed onto the web, I've tended to develop on my local machine, often with no specific configuration environment. If I did use an environment, it'd often be a Vagrant VM instance. From here, I'd push to GitHub, then from my VPS, pull down the changes, run any deployment scripts (recompile, restart nginx, etc), and I'm done.

I guess what I'm after with Docker is something that's more consistent between dev, testing, & prod, and is also more hands off in the deployment process. Yet, what I'm currently developing still does have differing configuration needs between dev and prod. For example, I'd like to use a hosted DB solution such as DigitalOcean Managed Databases in production, yet I'm totally fine using a Docker container for MySQL for local development. Is something like this possible? Does anyone have any recommendations around how to accomplish this, any do's and dont's, or any catches that are worth mentioning?

How about automating deployment from GitHub to production? I've never touched any CI/CD tools in my life, yet I know it's a hugely important part of the process when dealing with software in production, especially software that has clients dependent on it to function. Does anything specifically work well with Docker? Or GitHub? Ideally I want to be avoiding manual processes where I have to ssh in, and pull down the latest changes, half-remembering the commands I need to write to recompile and run the application again.

20 years ago I saw a computer scientist on TV saying that operating systems should come up with a better way to organize and present files, something that took into consideration the files we used the most and the ones we were likely to use again. Not just a recent files menu, but some form of AI prediction that would prepare our desktops with little intervention. This, of course, didn't happen, but I think about it from time to time. I would love to have an AI that would understand my workflow and do a bunch of things for me.

This is obviously way too advanced as an answer to this thread, but I'm curious: what did you expect to already exist in the field of computer science, but simply didn't pan out?

I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone but the new reddit can't load any data, at least for me. However, old.reddit.com works, and all mobile apps seem to work which obviously use the reddit API. I am curious, does reddit have a different version of their API for the redesign, and that's what's been down for hours?

edit: I know that reddit must allow their own product to do things that other products don't.. Like it seems the chat api is not open to 3rd parties.. but I assumed that they would have just blocked certain api endpoints from public exposure. But based on my blind troubleshooting of this case, it seems that they must be using a totally different interface all together for the redesign?

Hmm, so I've heard reddit is super-cached... is this possibly a caching fault then?

reddit uses redis, correct? And it must be sharded, right? So maybe some redis cluster nodes are down?

I'm trying to learn here, and I am likely asking the wrong questions.. The goal of my post was to understand this type of failure, as I realize that it must be partial as in if all of reddit resign was down, it would be news. If anyone could correct any of my statements or assumptions I would really appreciate it.

Hey Tildes!

I've got a static, basic website, HTML and CSS. It's one page only. But I'd like to create a second page with some more private content that is password protected.

I know that I can accomplish this via .htaccess but what I don't like about this method is that when the user navigates to the page, they get a pop up asking for a username and password. What I would like is having the user navigate to the page, and then they are met with a simple form asking for just a password (no username). After they enter the password, the "veil" lifts or the page forwards and they get the private content.

Here's the thing... the content really only needs to seem private. It's not super secret, personal information. I don't want it indexed by search engines (nofollow), and I want it basically hidden, but the password is only there to make the user feel exclusive. If some tech-minded person encountered this page and jumped through a bunch of hoops to get in without the password, it's not a big deal to me. In reality, 99.9% of people accessing this page will not be able to bypass the password.

I'm guessing this can be accomplished easily in Javascript, but I don't really know much Javascript apart from finding code snippets and plunking them in. I also want to be able to fully design the password entry page so that it looks branded, so a code snippet plunked down into my HTML doc would be great for this.

If there is an easy way to actually protect the content behind the password, that would be excellent. In this case, I imagine it would be much like a news site with an ad-blocker-blocker. Just some kind of pop-up that blocks all the content. Enter the password, and you're in.

Anyhow, I hope I've described what I'm looking for accurately enough. Anybody have any easy and quick ways to accomplish this?

What is the programming language you enjoy the most, or otherwise define as your favourite? Why is that particular language your favourite?

Bonus: add just a little bit of code in it that you think exposes its beauty.

This is of course the age old debate, which on other sites has been known to quickly devolve (one of the Internet ‘holy wars’ of yore). Nonetheless, I am curious.

I personally use vim. Part of the reason is surely that it is just the first one of the two that I happened to use, and thus by the time I tried emacs I was used to vim. But more broadly, I enjoy using vim because once you get over the hump of ‘weird’ commands and modes, I feel that vim most closely emulates the feelings and thought process that you have when building something with your hands. You can pick up different tools, yank pieces out and rearrange them, turn the object around in your hands to see different parts, etc etc. Once you internalize the movement and editing you really start flying around. At that point the interface seems less like a barrier between you and the text and more like a way to ‘hold’ it.

Of course, people have different preferences.

Those of you who keep hundreds of tabs open: I'm curious how and why you use them. I'd hoard tabs in the past, but in a sad incident a browser (Firefox) restart caused the loss of all my 10s of open tabs that was accumulated over weeks long research about a topic, I decided to never trust tabs again. Now I'm making use of my bookmars toolbar, Org mode and Instapaper for most of the stuff having many tabs open was the method before. So, for me, tabs were for keeping stuff handy during research, read-it-later lists, and temporary bookmarks. What are the use cases for you?

I have been listening to "Darknet Diaries" and it's a great podcast, but I am looking for more. Maybe more technical.

Does anyone have any good recommendations? Thanks!

Edit: if you are like me, and learning about this stuff, here is an interesting and hilarious episode of mini-stories from Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/22/

I saw back in January that a lot of you were on Linux, I guess I should've expected that considering it's ~comp but I'm curious how the trend is going. But to spice things up a little bit more, tell us about you favourite programs, any hidden gems?

I personally run a fairly standard Fedora 30 install running gnome and some flatpaks. I'd say my favourite programs are

Gnome Builder :

Well, I've been trying to fight the electron uprising while still using a modern and open source IDE and well, I think it works great and looks pretty good too.

Dino.im (Using the Flatpak PR) :

It's light, supports XMPP and looks relatively modern, what more could you ask?

Firefox gnome theme :

It's not really a program and just really a skin for Firefox but I really like it. It integrates pretty neatly with the rest of the desktop. Can't wait for the Gnome 3.32 changes to come in though since it kinda clashes with the new theme.

I'll be writing a relatively large piece of scientific code for the first time, and before I begin I would at least like to outline how the project will be structured so that I don't run into headaches later on. The problem is, I don't have much experience structuring large projects. Up until now most of the code I have written as been in the form of python scripts that I string together to form an ad-hoc pipeline for analysis, or else C++ programs that are relatively self contained. My current project is much larger in scope. It will consist of four main 'modules' (I'm not sure if this is the correct term, apologies if not) each of which consist of a handful of .cpp and .h files. The schematic I have in mind for how it should look is something like:

src
 ├──Module1 (Initializer)
 │         ├ file1.cpp
 │         ├ file1.h
 │         │...
 │         └ Makefile
 ├───Module2 (solver)
 │          ├ file1.cpp
 │          ├ file1.h
 │          │...
 │          └ Makefile
 ├───Module3 (Distribute)
 │          ├ file1.cpp
 │          └Makefile 
 └ Makefile

Basically, I build each self-contained 'module', and use the object files produced there to build my main program. Is there anything I should keep in mind here, or is this basically how such a project should be structured?

I imagine the particularly structure will be dependent on my project, but I am more interested in general principles to keep in mind.

I have found this to be a semi controversial topic. Its almost becoming a required point for getting a new job to have open source work that you can show. Some people just enjoy working on programming side projects and others don't want to do any more after they leave the office.

Whats your opinion on this? Do you work on any side projects? Do you think its reasonable for interviewers to look for open source work when hiring?

I'm looking for a cheap small factor mechanical keyboard. I love the looks of XD64 or a JJ50. How do i go about it? I Don't want the numpad, don't care about leds and prefer more retro/sober styles than the ones with wings and dragons and lasers blazing across the keys.

I live in Brazil, so i'll have to import everything. I'm looking to buy everything from one place if possible.

I was looking at KPrepublic. What do i need for the xd64?

1. Plastic case
2. Key caps
3. XD64 PCB with gateron switchs (Kit 10)

Do i need plate and stabilizers? It's already $91 without it. If it's necessary, i think it would be a better idea to just buy a Durgod Taurus k320 since it's cheaper.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: Got a Magicforce 68 for $47. Thanks for the help!

Pretty straight forward question, but basically I was watching a discussion panel the other day talking about the ethics of Self-Driving cars. A topic came up about people writing crappy code, and more than that, people not testing their code. And if they do, they do point testing. I am in my last semester of uni and I am working with some companies where we are doing pretty extensive testing, happy flows and a lot of alternate flows, as well as UI/UX testing. I wanted to extend this question to you, do you guys do testing, what type? How much do you focus on it? And if u love it/hate it?

I've been trying to set up a reliable lightweight solution for high quality, low-latency webcam (v4l2) streaming from Linux server to browsers, allowing for small (1-5) number of concurrent viewers.

The obvious choice here is WebRTC, which when used through browser APIs, works wonderfully. It has low latency and automatic quality adjustment depending on network performance.
I also checked out RTSP and RTMP, which are not supported without browser plugins. Next candidates were DASH and HLS, but while they provide high quality, they also have high latency.
For a while I used MPEG1 streaming through Websockets (using jsmpeg library), which worked and had low latency, but the video quality was bad.

Back to WebRTC - It seems like reliable, lightweight and maintained projects are really hard to find. So far I've found a few WebRTC media servers, but they're overkill for my use case:

• Janus
• MediaSoup
• Kurento (unmaintained)

I also tried implementing this functionality using low level Gstreamer elements in Python using PyGObject, but that's proving to be rather complicated with a ton of extremely low level implementation details.

If anyone has tried doing something similar, I'd really like to hear what (if any) problems you had and if you found any sane solutions. Next thing on my list is using headless Chromium in combination with Puppeteer, but I'd really prefer more lightweight solutions.

Previous threads:

What DE and distro do you use and why?

What's your OS and how does it look?

What does your desktop look like? What tools do you swear by?

I've recently switched to Arch and today, it's finally done! You have no idea how hard it was to even turn it off. So I wanted to make another OS/screenshot thread, especially since it's been quite a long time since the last one, and Tildes population increased inbetween, so we might find something interesting again :-)

What's your OS, what do you love about it and how does it look?

Disclaimer: I'm on Windows 10

I keep hopping between text editors because I can't find one that suits my needs. I need something simplistic, non-bloated, beginner friendly, open source, and preferably with Dracula theme. I'll list off the ones that I've tried that I don't like too much:

• Atom
• Vim
• Emacs
• Notepad++
• VS Code

Honestly, I'd really like something that's like very similar to Sublime but FOSS. Is there one like that?

My pick is Perl5. Even though a lot people (mostly those who’ve never touched Perl) say it’s a “write only” language, I think it does a lot right. It’s easy to prototype with, and it gives you a lot of freedom in how you want to solve a problem; which I think is one of the most important features of a programming language.

I’d like to know what your picks are!

I've recently started taking some IT and programming classes at a local college because I've always been interested in IT as a career but I've never had any sort of professional experience in the field. Are there any skills that I need to definitely know, or any sort of certifications that I can get in order to get my foot in the door and start applying for IT focused jobs?

As someone who is not mainly a web developer, I can barely grasp the immensity of options when it comes to writing a web application.

So far everything I've written has been using PHP and the Slim microframework. PHP because I don't use languages like Python/Ruby/JS that much so I didn't have any prior knowledge of those, and I've found myself to be fairly productive with it. Slim because I didn't want a full-blown framework with 200 files to configure.

I've tried Go because I've used it in the past but I don't see it to be very fit when it comes to websites, I think it's fine for small microservices but doing MVC was a chore, maybe there's a framework out there that solves this.

As for the frontend I've been trying to use as little JavaScript as possible, always vanilla. As of HTML and CSS I'm no designer so I kind of get by copying code and tweaking things here and there.

However I've started a slightly bigger project and I don't fancy myself writing everything from scratch (specially security) besides, ORMs can be useful. Symfony4 is what I've been using for a couple of days, but I've had trouble setting up debugging, and the community/docs don't seem that great since this version is fairly new; so I'm considering trying out something more popular like Django.

So this is why I created the post, I know this will differ greatly depending on the use-case. But I would like to do a quick survey and hear some of your recommendations, both on the backend and frontend. Besides I think it's a good topic for discussion.

Cheers!

I’ve recently gotten to speak with a few folks who work at an enterprise security company. I asked what their security researchers set as company rules for allowed laptops. My one datapoint so far is “Dell or Apple.” So for example, no Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is arguably the best work laptop.

I am curious what other large security companies (or any of you security minded folks) set as rules for trusted laptops. Can anyone share their lists and theories as to why I heard Dell and Apple? BIOS is more trustworthy?

Blatantly stealing from the excellent post by /u/judah, I figured I'd make a sysadmin version because sysadmins tend to be underrepresented in tech discussions. Please keep your answers as cross-platform as possible without being uselessly generic.

I'll start. Realize that the system is going to go down, and accept that reality. Accept failure. How you respond to failure is how people who aren't sysadmins will see and value you.

Just a bit curious. Currently, mine looks like this. It runs Elementary OS, however considering hijacking it to Bedrock Linux, mainly to get cutting edge software from the AUR (for stuff like Firefox and GIMP) without losing all my data. I think I'll wait for Bedrock to go stable first, though.

It uses the ePapirus icon theme, which is just Papirus with better support for Elementary's UI. GTK theme is (if I remember correctly) Qogir and the Plank theme is the GTK one. What do yours look like?

Does anyone have any experience working as a contractor in the IT field? I have 4 years of experience in the IT industry, all of it as a full time direct hire. I may have an opportunity to work for a very large company on a 2 year contract at fairly reasonable salary increase. The most important part to me is that I will be getting some experience off of the service desk as well, which I can use to continue my career going forward.

My main concern is that I am unfamiliar with contract work. I do know that I get health benefits / 401k / sick days, but I assume there must be a drawback to being a contractor, right? I feel like being a contractor is inherently more unstable than being an actual hire. The position I am being considered for is a 2 year contract, but I worry that the position could simply disappear a few months in and I'd be out of a job. Is this a fair feeling, and is there any way I can gauge how true this might be for my position? Is there something I could discreetly ask in my interview that might help me understand if this is a stable position?

If anyone has any experience as a contractor, I'd love to hear it.

Hi guys,

I'm really stumped and looking for a nudge in the right direction for how to utilise the ghoneycutt/pam module in puppet. Relatively new to this but got what I'd like to think as most the basics down.

I've configured a few things using modules such as NTP, SSSD and NSSWITCH but I'm just stuck on how I can use this module and pull info from Hiera into it.

So, lets start with

.yaml file:

        ### nsswitch.conf authentication configuration

        nsswitch::passwd:     'files sss'

        nsswitch::shadow:     'files sss'

And then looking at the nsswitch.pp file:

        ### nsswitch.config setup

        class profile::linux::base::nsswitch {

        # Get heira values

          class { 'nsswitch':

            passwd    => [lookup('nsswitch::passwd')],

            shadow    => [lookup('nsswitch::shadow')],

Simple enough to call the values I want and works how I want, now I'm trying to do the same type of thing for PAM using the ghoneycutt/pam module and there doesn't seem to be much info on how to use it, or it's just not sinking in for me.

Some of my PAM Heira values:

        pam::pam_auth_lines:
          - '# Managed by Hiera key pam::pam_auth_lines'
          - 'auth        required      pam_env.so'
          - 'auth        sufficient    pam_fprintd.so'
          - 'auth        sufficient    pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass'
          - 'auth        requisite     pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet'
          - 'auth        sufficient    pam_sss.so use_first_pass'
          - 'auth        required      pam_deny.so'
        pam::pam_account_lines:
          - '# Managed by Hiera key pam::pam_account_lines'
          - 'account     required      pam_unix.so'
          - 'account     sufficient    pam_localuser.so'
          - 'account     sufficient    pam_succeed_if.so uid < 500 quiet'
          - 'account     [default=bad success=ok user_unknown=ignore] pam_sss.so'
          - 'account     required      pam_permit.so'
        pam::pam_password_lines:
          - '# Managed by Hiera key pam::pam_password_lines'
          - 'password    requisite     pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type='
          - 'password    sufficient    pam_unix.so sha512 shadow nullok try_first_pass use_authtok'
          - 'password    sufficient    pam_sss.so use_authtok'
          - 'password    required      pam_deny.so'

Some things I've tried:

1:

        class profile::linux::base::pam {
          # resources
          class { 'pam':
            password-auth-ac  => [
              lookup('pam::pam_auth_lines')],
              lookup('pam::pam_account_lines')],
              lookup('pam::pam_password_lines')],
              lookup('pam::pam_session_lines')],
           }

2:

	
	      passwd  => [
	
	      lookup('pam::pam_auth_lines'),
	
	      lookup('pam::pam_account_lines'),
	
	      lookup('pam::pam_password_lines'),
	
	      lookup('pam::pam_session_lines'),
	
	      ],
	
	  }

        include ::pam

	class profile::linux::base::pam {
	
	  # resources
	
	    include ::pam

	         lookup('pam::pam_auth_lines')
	
	}

I've tried a few other ways and can't get it to work as I want it to. Can anyone help?

Thanks

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

I've been thinking about this but based on the current rulings in the Oracle v. Google court case, it would seem that APIs are indeed copyrightable.

This would mean that Wine would be infringing on Microsoft's copyright of the Windows API and system calls. Of course it wouldn't matter until Microsoft actually does something about it. But as Wine gets better and better and its market share higher and higher, I worry that Microsoft might set their sights on Wine now that they have the law on their side.

One of the people in an IRC channel I frequent pointed out a site I've been building uses CDNs that are IPv4 only. I never realized this, I just assumed every major provider had deployed IPv6. Oh, how very wrong I was. A quick check of some major (to me) sites shows a shocking lack of IPv6, including:

• Bootstrap (stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com)
• Discord
• FontAwesome (use.fontawesome.com)
• GitHub/GitHub pages
• GitLab/GitLab pages (self-hosted supports IPv6, but officially hosted GitLab only supports IPv4 due to Azure limitations)
• jQuery, IF you use code.jquery.com (some tutorials use ajax.googleapis.com, which does have IPv6, but an unfortunate amount use code.jquery.com, including the getting started page for Bootstrap)
• Parts of Amazon/AWS (Amazon is IPv4 only, some of AWS is IPv4 only, including S3)
• Reddit
• Stack Overflow/Exchange/etc
• Twitter

An honorable mention goes to Angular's websites because the websites themselves are IPv4 only but the libraries are hosted on ajax.googleapis.com, which is IPv6 accessible. I checked npm, PyPI, RubyGems, and Tildes, and they all support IPv6.

I can understand why companies like Amazon have partial support (upgrading can be a PITA if you're a cloud service provider with uptime requirements), but then you have services like Discord (launched in 2015 with no obligation to maintain service) that only support IPv4. At the very least, I'd expect CDNs referenced by thousands (if not millions) of webpages to be on IPv6 by now.

Am I missing something? CDNs are pretty static, it's just a matter of choosing one that supports IPv6, you don't even need to update your application if you just change the DNS entries.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

I just received a mail from my own e-mail address, hosted on Gandi on my own domain name. It said that the sender has hacked me, used malware, keyloggers and RDP to get my passwords and copy all my files to his own computer, and took videos of me while watching adult content using my webcam (I never noticed the light turning on for it). Claims they've been doing this for a few months. Gives a bitcoin address and wants $1000 (a sum I can't and won't give, don't even have a fraction of it) in 48 hrs, or else will share the videos with my contacts. It said something about a pixel the message included.

I viewed the message from K-9 mail on android (which didn't tell anything about pixels or whatnot), and when I went back on my computer to check the headers and stuff, the message was deleted.

Now, is this some sort of phishing or or have I really been pwned? I feel like it's just phishing, but the message deleting itself kinda gave me shills of fear. I promptly changed my password for the mail account.

I don't know what is the correct word in English, but I'll be one of those guys who will teach a "class" consisting on answering questions and guiding them through the exercises.

The content is very basic algorithms in C, so things like functions, pointers, and structs are off the scope. Here is the repo I made with the solutions for last semester. I'm starting in the second semester, so I have everything fresh in my memory.

I welcome anything you can give but I'm not necessarily seeking technical advice since the teachers have that covered. What I'd really like to know is what you consider to be some good examples, attitudes, and approaches for this particular position. Thanks.

Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language:

(…) Go intentionally has a weak type system, and there are many restrictions that can be expressed in other languages but cannot be expressed in Go. Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types. (…)

I found this distinction, writing code vs. writing types, very insightful. In my experience, in a language like Rust or (modern fancy) C++ the programmer is constantly forced to think about types, while when I program in Go or C, I almost never think about them. Types are, in fact, almost always obvious. It is also interesting that languages like Haskell and Idris explicitly expect the programmer to program with types.

What do you think?

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a manager complain, “The HR department included ‘must have college degree’ in the job req even though I don’t care” or “They asked for 5 years of experience in a technology that’s only been around for 3” or “I have no idea why they rejected this candidate without even contacting me.”

Still, in many cases you don’t have a choice. If you want to hire someone, you need to deal with HR, at least to a small degree – especially if you work in a big company.

So I’m writing a feature story for technology managers, collecting real-world advice from people who learned their lessons the hard way. Here’s the questions I’d like you to answer:

• Tell me about a frustration you had with the HR department (in regard to hiring). That is, tell me a personal story of HR-gone-wrong. Because we all love schadenfreude, and that gives me an emotional example with which to begin.
• Let’s say you have a new opening in your department. In what ways do you involve HR? (That could be anything from, “give them general guidelines and let them choose the best candidates for me to interview” to “I do the search myself, and use HR only for on-boarding.”) What makes you choose that path? How much choice do you have in the matter?
• What weaknesses have you discovered in your HR department’s ability to serve the needs of a tech-focused department?
• What have you done to cope with those weaknesses? Which of those efforts worked, and which failed?
• What do you wish you knew “n” years ago about dealing with your company’s HR department?
• So that I can give the reader some context: Let me know how to refer to you in the article (at least, “Esther, a software architect at a Midwest insurance company”), and give me some idea of your company size (because the processes appropriate for a 70-person company aren’t the same for one with 7,000 employees).

You don’t have to answer all those questions! I asked these to get the conversation going. Tell me as much or as little as you like.

Please don’t assume that I think HR always sucks. However, there isn’t as much to learn from “why HR is your friend.” The idea here is to help techie managers cope when HR doesn’t offer what you hoped for.

In the rare chance you haven't heard of Flutter, here's the link: https://flutter.io

Flutter just officially left beta with v1.0 December 4, last year. The code is written in Dart, and deploys on Android, and iOS (and will run natively on the rumored Fuchsia OS).

So for those of you that have used Flutter or are currently using Flutter.

• What are you working on?
• Why'd you choose Flutter?
• What do you like about Flutter?
• And what do you dislike about Flutter?

I'll start:

I'm working on a niche art app. I myself do not do that type of art, but knowing people that do, I wanted to create a tool to fill in the lackluckster market for Chromebooks and Android.
I chose Flutter because:

• I wanted to try something new, and what newer than something that was (at the time) in beta?
• Custom Views in Android are a hassle.
• I will be able to release on both Android and iOS (semi-)natively without having to code it twice.

Here's what I like about Flutter:

• Layouts are really simple.
  (though you can easily let it get clustered if you don't think too much about it.)
• Design isn't an afterthought.
  Animations are built in (and simple), themes aren't hard-coded, and Material Components get more attention here. (Still waiting for Shapes on Android)
• It's fast by design.
  Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine (Skia). I've never experienced any stutter with the built-in components, and when I caused lag (with heavy I/O) Flutter/Dart had tools in place for me to narrow down exactly what was causing it.

What I don't like about Flutter:

• It has poor mouse/trackpad support.
  Right clicks, not a thing. I can workaround this with a double-click/long-click, but for a desktop OS, this isn't optimal. Scrolling, that's panning, this should be differentiated. There's a difference between using a scrollwheel and moving finger around on the screen. According to Flutter there is not. There's also currently no support for mouse hovers which I have needed very much.
  There is a pull-request for adding support for all of these, but the developer hasn't done anything since code review.
• Keyboard support, while there, is lackluster.
  Ctrl, Shift, Alt. These have to be gotten with the meta code. There's no built-in function for checking those. Text fields don't support the tab key to navigate. And text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) isn't possible with text fields without the use of a library (or making it yourself).

I was trying to think of a third dislike, but I can't. My complaints are on missing APIs for Chromebooks. That's it. I really like Flutter, I plan on using it more, and if they won't add support for mouse/keyboard, maybe I'll have to contribute.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts about it is.