Make a game. Or contribute to an existing open source game. You can easily set and adjust the scope and depth of the project so that it's fun and challenging. Chances are, you already play some games you like, and chances are you can get inspired for your own game project there. And perhaps others will even find it fun to play.

Somehow, when I get playing a game for any period of time, sooner or later I slowly switch to hacking the codebase as it ends up being even more fun. :-) If you're interested in building a non-trivial game, you may find it interesting to take a look at the code of existing open source games and start hacking them. You will find fun and rewarding low-hanging fruit features lying all around. In strategies - Freeciv, OpenTTD, Wesnoth, Widelands..., arcades like Supertux or Stepmania or even FPS like Xonotic. Or UI or computer player for a board game.

Games are also nice because they are very multi-faceted - you can start by adding simple features, but also work on optimization and better core algorithms, graphics programming, network programming, improve the user interface, porting it to a new platform or have a go at building an AI computer opponent. Hey, try building an AI for OpenTTD, none of them is perfect and they have a nice plugin system. And if you get more involved, imho they look pretty cool on a CV of any programmer.

I actually think it's not really possible to do it fool-proof. You may eventually get right as in mathematically right in some formal system, but then the problem is in quality of your formal system.

10 years ago, people often wouldn't account for timing attacks (though I admit they were proposed ~20 years ago) and things like that. It's still well possible that there are attacks noone concieved of yet and implementations may or may not be vulnerable. Heck, it's possible a specific sequence of instructions your single true implementation compiles to on some future architecture triggers a subtle bug.

I still believe that even for the most basic plumbing, diversity is a good thing and it's not possible to get any slightly complex software 100% right, 100% foolproof in the real world, even if you manage to do it in an abstract formal system.

In some cases, fragmentation is bad. In case of critical infrastructure, fragmentation is great!

Having multiple interoperating implementations has been always one of the basic requirements for internet standards, it ensures future growth and leaving out the worst warts, dependency on undocumented behavior etc. But most importantly, if a bug is found in one of the implementations, it cannot take out the complete internet infrastructure because large parts of it are running a different implementation. Even if a bug is found on a protocol level, some implementations may not implement that feature or implement it slightly differently and aren't involved. Fragmentation is essential to the robustness of internet.

A lot of people in embedded are still bit twiddling on an AVR. :-) Or a smaller ARM uCU like in the mbed board.

I just, like many others, wish someone would actually fucking *elaborate* on *concrete* *technical* hurdles of HTML5. We are not denying there are none, but just saying "you are clueless if you need to ask" is not going to help your position. We don't want to argue with you but we want you to actually explain yourselves. Gee, this thread is so frustrating.

I completely agree that the mail archives UI is awful. Mailman2 archives could use many improvements (nicer thread browsing including cross-month threads, _optional_ threads collapsing, web-form replies, fulltext search, ...) but I don't really follow the direction in which HyperKitty is going - views like https://lists.stg.fedoraprojec... are a complete mess; having a one-mail per line concise view had great value...

It's still beta, I'm not hopeless; I think HyperKitty could be made much more usable by a few simple UI tweaks (and hopefully things like comment voting are optional). Perhaps we will get / can make a "classic theme". :-)

"Very well known?" This is very much *not* the way how for example many security bugs in linux distributions are handled (http://oss-security.openwall.org/wiki/mailing-lists/distros). Gradual disclosure along a well-defined timeline limits damage of exposure to blackhats and at the same time allows enough reaction time to prepare and push updates to the user. So typically, once the software vendor has fixed the issue, they would notify distributions, which would be given some time to prepare and test an updated package, then the update is pushed to users at a final disclosure date.

For a bug of such severity, I'd agree that the embargo time of 7-14 days used by distros@ is way too long. But a 12-24 hour advance announcement would be quite reasonable. Large website operations typically may have suitable staffing to be able to bring a specific update for a critical bug (similar in potential damages to a service outage) online within 6-12 hours, so a next step would be passing the information from distributions to these users (e.g. via a support contract with distros@-subscribed vendor).

In this timeframe, you have a good chance to prepare updated packages for major archs and do an emergency rollout. At the same time, even if there is a leak, the leak needs to propagate to skilled blackhat developers, they need to develop an exploit and this exploit needs to get propagated to people who would deploy it in the remaining time frame.

I *think* it might be feasible to exploit your web browser to steal cookies or saved credentials if you connect to a rogue https site. Credentials are always nice for spamming. If you convince people to keep you open in another tab, you might get lucky and snoop some credit card numbers or banking credentials too. A regular person should fear mainly automated attacks like this.

(Please do prove me wrong if I didn't get the attack potential here right.)

For one, you need an FTP _server_ to exchange files (or your desktops need to be always-on, with public IP addresses). The same with rsync or ssh. I have one and I'm fine without these cloud services, but the point here is that people don't have to set up their own.

(A service that would allow an end-user to easily roll their own VPS or buy preconfigured RPi/whatever with pre-configured mail server, webmail client, file sharing etc. would be awesome. Some are in the works, none are ready yet. Which is why cloud services matter for users.)

Hard to see indeed, but warnings can be overlooked/ignored. C.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... from 2005. It flew for another hour after most everyone fell unconscious before it crashed into a mountain.

Those people live(d) different lifestyles "appropriate" for their wealth. Their residence, for example, was somewhat different than a suburb house that's essentially trivial to break into. Also, the Bitcoin business is a little richer on violent criminals than IT.

Wow, that's awesome! But doesn't cosmology involve a lot of mathematics, actually quite crazy stuff? How did she get through that?

Reference needed wrt. "many who suffer from dyscalculia excel at higher math". Not understanding basic numbers and algebra like fractions means that you simply never have much chance to progress to anything higher and interesting. Especially if your first few teachers are incompetent. And without the technical skill and gained routine, it's quite difficult to acquire intuition about how many pieces of higher math work.

Also, algebra is important for many other areas of science - biology, chemisty, any lab work; mixing solutions, configuring equipment, basic statistics, ... Discalculia means you have big trouble distinguishing between 10 and 100 or comparing 0.32 and 0.23 - you can't (at least easily) build an intuition for it and you have to always fall back to high-level reasoning and logic to work through it. It's possible to make a carreer in natural sciences with discalculia, but it requires huge motivation and effort.

(I have been intensely teaching someone with discalculia for some time. It's one of the disabilities that's difficult to appreciate without experience.)

Individual groups of people all trying to accomplish the same thing or things is absolutely essential to get stuff done. It motivates people to focus and work hard on the problem, because they know that others are working hard too and they will likely reach similar quality and are progressing fast. The competition between people means competition between solutions, which allows the soundest solutions to prevail (up to exceptions).

Competition can be friendly, especially if you are not too emotionally invested, and that's great especially for the people involved. Unfriendly competition is still great in the long run even though it introduces redundancies. The space race gave a big surge to the technological progress. Sport competitions give many athletes (or chess players or whoever) an incentive to improve. Computer Go programs evolved rapidly recently also thanks to competition. Recent Debian discussions about their next init system gave massive boost to openrc development.

Without competition, people are lazy and slack, since any effort is not worth it! Competition is awesome!

It makes total sense for me, if you realize that your job is to be just a transport company, not a redistribution company.

Up to now (and of course you can still stay in that mode in the new version), you would just take the lumber from a forest and deliver to whatever sawmill. But in reality, you should deliver it to whatever sawmill the forest has contract with! I.e., sawmills will make contracts with forests and use you just as a transport company - then your job is to get the cargo from the correct forest to the correct sawmill.

(An important playability factor is that only reachable destinations are considered. So if you just created a dedicated line between two industries, you will not be asked to transport the cargo elsewhere.)

(N.B. I didn't try the cargodist mode yet so I'm not 100% sure if it works the way I'd suppose it works. I'd also expect it to allow you to enable it just for passenger+mail, as these are really special cases compared to other cargo.)