If by hacking you mean programming, then nothing really inspired me. You had to be a programmer to get something useful out of a Commodore 64 besides playing games. So I guess you could say wanting to do something besides play games inspired me to be a programmer.

This item hit reddit earlier, so I'll repeat my advice.

It might be easier to begin with a kernel module that is useful to you, and either work with the developer or find a module where the developer has lost interest instead.

I worked on two kernel modules, one called oplbeep and the other was totem. Both very simple things that required porting when interfaces changed. Today I work on the vmware modules which are always requiring tweaking (at least unless you upgrade to the latest version of VMWare more regularly) but I do that just to get my work done.

The human brain has multiple neural nets and a voter.

I am face blind and completely non-visual, but I do recognize people. I can because the primary way that we recognize people is by encoding a schematic image of the face, but many other nets are in play. For example, I use hair style, clothing, and height. So does everybody, though. But for most people that just gives you extra confidence.

Conclusion: Neural nets in your brain having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. The entire system is highly redundant.

When people characterize HFT (high-frequency trading), they conveniently leave out the programmers and the human traders. HFT is done by programmers and human traders. The notion that computers are trading with themselves is absurd. Programmers write the code, and traders supply the algorithms, ideas, guidance, experience, etc. Sometimes the programmers are also traders, but you get the idea.

When people use a computer they don't think about the thousands of people who wrote the software they are using. They think of a computer as a monolithic thing, when in reality everything that a computer does is people doing work for other people. When people "use" computers, the programmers do the work, or rather they did the work. The computer itself does nothing by itself.

Robots are the same way. They execute instructions written by people. A robot is simply another interface that programmers present to other people. To think about robots separate from their programmers is silly. The programmers reap the rewards from and ought to bear the responsibilities of robotics.

In order to simplify matters, I'm leaving out the hardware designers, the electrical engineers. Without them, programming would be pointless. But the same argument holds true. The robot is an expression of the hardware and software people. Did the people at Craftsman do a good job making that wrench you used to replace the fan belt on your car? The wrench didn't make itself, people did. Craftsman wrenches are damned good products because of the people who make them. A wrench doesn't stand alone as a separate entity, and neither should robots.

Many, many generations in the future, robots may become viral and start making other robots. They might even consider themselves to be separate from their human makers, but that would be the height of arrogance on their part, assuming that people programmed them to be able to experience arrogance.

A bit condescending of an attitude for someone that is working at Microsoft, a company that is clearly on the wane. People don't go to Microsoft to create anything great. They go there for a stable income for their family and mortgage.

Programming is a set of thought processes that are being applied regardless of the language or environment being used. The other part is markup or translation, and that part of the work should be minimized.

I've been programming since I was a little kid and now I'm almost 40. In developing my craft over 30 years I've focused on learning how to write solid code that can be easily modified by the next person. The software that you write needs to read like Hemingway: short, simple, and declarative. When you think of programming in terms of languages, you're doing it wrong.

One day we will instruct computer AIs completely in a natural language like English or another language. The more cumbersome the markup and translation, the further you stray from that goal.

Thinking narrowly, there are features of languages that have proven to be useful over time, such as object orientation. The key here though is abstraction. However we do it, the programmers' job is to move electrons around. At every abstraction we should strive to simplify and in my mind I see a convergence such as the natural language interface. To facilitate it we need to think about what it really means to be a programmer, what it has always meant, and what it will always mean: To convey an accurate and modifiable sequence of instructions to some device in the most efficient way possible.

The best programming languages work like and use the same parts of the brain that reading and writing do. It is no surprise that the language of mathematics reads left to right, uses Latin symbols, and roughly follows European languages in grammar and syntax. (In certain parts of the Arab-speaking world, some mathematical expressions are written left to right, but this is not universal.)

As the syntaxes of programming languages become more elaborate, the cognitive load involved in programming increases. As other parts of the brain become involved, programming error rates increase, not to mention the common sense notion that completely learning the language becomes unachievable for most people and every programmer works with his or her own subset making code maintenance difficult.

C++ with its feature-packed templates makes people who love a language to have every concept from computer science packed into it happy, but it doesn't serve programmers and hence humanity very well.

The ideal programming interface is you telling the computer exactly what you want it to do in English, not the the opposite. We're decades away from an AI that can automatically write code, but making the programmer's link to the computer more difficult to convey unambiguous instructions seems to be going in the opposite direction.

Concrete contributed to the rise of Rome, and this part of Rome remains today because concrete laid by Romans is still being used in 2014.

Slashdot is written in Roman Latin letters. Hundreds of millions of people speak modern versions of Rome's Latin language. The language of modern science and medicine is Latin.

Did Rome really fall or are we Roman?

The biggest danger from nuclear is acute exposure and death to thousands and perhaps millions of human and humanlike species in the future as storage facilities are pilfered over the next 1,000,000-10,000,000 years.

How many of you could read a warning written in cuneiform? That language is one of the earliest known languages and is only about 5,000 years old. Let's say that most people in the world can probably only read a language that's 500 years old or less, and may struggle with earlier written versions, if there were any. Maybe you're lucky enough to read 2000+ year old Hebrew. But that's just one language. What about all of the other written languages from 2,000 years ago? And what about cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Greek? Ancient Chinese?

How in the hell are people supposed to read warnings written in any 2014 Earth language 50,000 years into the future, let alone 500,000 years into the future? That's 10 and 100 times longer than we've written down any language. 5,000,000 years of intelligibility is what we really need. That's why I see a nuclear holocaust to come not from a detonation but from innocent explorers long disconnected from our language and culture.

Earth will only be safe until all nuclear waste is off the planet, or we come up with a way to transform it into substances no more dangerous than what was on this planet before the nuclear age. We cannot assume constant technological progress for millions of years. The entire lifespan of our species is only 200,000 years, and only 70,000 years ago we nearly went extinct.

1994 was the year I first installed Linux. By that point, there were a number of complete Linux distributions. I got my start with Slackware 2.0.

So he was definitely around for the open source movement, so to speak. It was off most peoples' radar screens in 1994. This site got its start in 1997. I think I joined in 1998.

This isn't gentrification. This is super rich people pushing out very rich people, as compared to everybody else in the country.

If you're paying more than $1,500/month rent to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're very rich. If you're paying $2,500/month to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're super rich. The last time any poor people lived in San Francisco was the 1960's.

The rest of the US population not living in San Francisco doesn't have very much sympathy for you, except maybe the unfortunate souls living in Boston or New York.

I use the terms very rich and super rich, but feel free to substitute "less affluent upper middle class" and "more affluent upper middle class," if it makes you feel any better.

I've not liked some of the things I've heard from Mr. de Raadt in the past because they seemed to be less fact than emotion, but in this case Theo has redeemed himself in a big way.

Like it or not, OpenSSL is now one of the most important pieces of software in the world. OpenSSL protects people's bank account numbers, credit card numbers, medical records, and employment records. OpenSSL protects corporate and government secrets (hopefully in combination with other defensive tactics). OpenSSL is not used for all encrypted network sockets, but it is widespread, to say the least.

de Raadt and his team are stripping OpenSSL down to its bare minimum. That is exactly what we all need. When someone's device creates an encrypted HTTP connection to another device, you want that functionality to work perfectly. That is the vast majority of use cases, and that most important use of OpenSSL failed in a spectacular fashion.

You don't care about being able to build OpenSSL on anything right now except OpenBSD. That is the platform de Raadt's team will be using for testing. You don't care about high-performance wrappers. Computers are lightning fast now, have gigantic amounts of memory, and network speeds are phenomenal compared to the requirements of using an HTTPS connection. OpenSSL today does not want for any system resource, even on a telephone or an embedded platform.

You don't need a platform on which to perform experiments in cryptography. OpenSSL was being used by scientists and mathematicians and the NSA to test new ideas. That is not an appropriate use for the mainline OpenSSL distribution.

Once de Raadt's team is finished, one or more of the hundreds of thousands of Windows programmers can spend a few weeks re-adding their build architecture and necessary wrappers for the latest versions of Windows and some Linux people can do the minor porting on that platform.

Perhaps the original OpenSSL can be relegated back to the laboratory. If you've ever used the OpenSSL command line programs, it feels like you're working with test tubes and bunsen burners. From what I've read of the code, it is no better.

Here's my opinion on apocalyptic planning. You're wasting your energy. We've been predicting that the apocalypse is right around the corner since the dawn of civilization.

Prepare yourself for _likely_ (mathematically probable) scenarios. If you're 40 or under, prepare yourself for the possibility of dying or being seriously injured in an automobile accident. Buy the safest vehicle you can afford, because this is your leading cause of death. If you're over 40, take measures to prevent yourself from dying of heart disease by eating right and getting more exercise.

A cache of guns and a bomb shelter full of provisions won't do you any good if you're obese and you die of heart attack at age 55. Nor will it do you much good if you're in your late 20's and you die in a car crash on the way to Wal-Mart to purchase rifles and canned food.

Continue doing whatever you're doing because if something serious like an asteroid hits Earth, you're already dead. Anything serious like that will completely rewrite all the rules for life, and you can't predict what you will need. Maybe the only thing you will need is genetic resistance to the diseases that will run rampant. Or the ability to hide. Or the ability to relax and not worry. Or the ability to accept death.

Let's take a step back and consider what systemd has given us compared to what we had before.

Before systemd, configuring what gets started on Linux systems was standard across all distributions, dating back to before 1995, when I started developing software with Linux. There was /etc/rc.d/init.d or in some cases /etc/init.d and in most cases there were links in rc1.d, rc2.d, rc3.d, etc. It was that simple. Nothing ever broke.

With systemd, a solution in search of a problem, everything changed. Now you have all of these directory hierarchies and countless old bugs that take years to get resolved. For example, "network restart" was broken in Fedora for ages for a machine of mine with one DHCP Ethernet interface and two static Ethernet interfaces (with nothing fancy like wireless). "network restart" fails on a variety of machines I have access to; forget about "network reload." ifcfg-eth0 and the like are simple things, some of the most basic boot-related operations. I've tried to open bugs but the problem seems to be buried somewhere in the guts of systemd.

I've had systems rendered unbootable during upgrades because of silent failures trying to make a good initrd. It's too complex to get everything right with systemd. For a long, long time when the boot scripts died with systemd there was no obvious way to see any errors. Recently they added some more debugging output suggesting that you use journalctl. Why didn't they tell us about that earlier? The reason? No documentation. They wrote an entirely new way to boot the system but kept the design in their heads. Maybe, many years later, there is some scant documentation available (except for that one old useless design document justifying systemd's existence that everyone has read). Of course, nobody writes man pages anymore but they were sure to remove the man pages for the old boot system.

So what new things does systemd give us? Pretty much nothing except for bugs. Maybe there are a few oddball use cases like booting off of weird media, but most people today boot off of a fixed hard drive that doesn't change in years. 19 years later it might be an SSD, but that is the same use case.

It will add $150 to the cost of the car, but when it fails the dealership will charge $500 for the same part plus labor to replace it.