According to this article cardiovascular disease makes you more susceptible to die from Coronavirus than anything else...

Co-morbidities also raise the risk of dying from Covid-19. China CDC’s analysis of 44,672 patients found that the fatality rate in patients who reported no other health conditions was 0.9%. It was 10.5% for those with cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for those with diabetes, 6.3% for people with chronic respiratory diseases such as COPD, 6.0% for people with hypertension, and 5.6% for those with cancer.

Not sure how long it would take for a vaccine to be available (many months, a year?), but it seems the best defense right now is to improve your cardiovascular health. Take a brisk walk 30 minutes each day, 5 days a week will put you at a lower risk from cardiovascular disease and possibly Coronavirus as well.

FWIW being young helps a lot too, and there's likely a correlation there between age and cardiovascular health as well...

Only 8.1% of cases were 20-somethings, 1.2% were teens, and 0.9% were 9 or younger. The World Health Organization mission to China found that 78% of the cases reported as of Feb. 20 were in people ages 30 to 69.

Deadlines are a fact of life in the corporate world. A good manager will have a phased plan that delivers a minimal product that will be enough to meet a given deadline - this minimal product is not expected to have much creativity or innovation. However, future plans should allocate a portion of the engineer's time to improve the product without the strict deadlines or even goals over an extended period, say 10% of their time (i.e. half a day per week) for as long as the product is supported.

Most engineers don't have any problems doing this - be it to simply refactor/cleanup code, find more efficient algorithms, and once in a while they might surprise everyone with an innovative addition. The more important aspect of this improvement phase is the process in which the engineer went about the task. E.g. an engineer discovers at the end of the exercise that they were not able to improve on scalability of the existing product, is in itself useful, because they managed to demonstate that the existing implemention is actually scalable. Some times they will encounter a problem or an improvement effort that will take more of their time or assistance from several other team members - this is usually a good thing.

Got to read Linus' comment in context of his post, otherwise it's a gross generalization where you're just arguing about semantics and opinions.

A better summarization of what Linus said is: take into account security aspects when designing a feature, so you don't rely on a kernel panic (or exceptions) when some rule is not observed.

Here is something analogous I ran into recently regarding a Java SDK that was not designed with security in mind. Java has a SealedObject to protect sensitive data while in memory - great feature, but then things got messy when it came to dealing with String instances. In Java it is considered bad practice to use String type to represent any kind of sensitive data like passwords because the String is immutable (i.e. it can be visible in the heap for quite a while before getting garbage collected, and if a heap dump is triggered you are screwed). What it boiled down to was the current SDK had signatures like the following:

setPassword(String pwd); // BAD!!!

instead of:

setPassword(char[] pwd); // better!

If the SDK was designed with setPassword(char[]) to begin with, SealedObject library usage would have been much simpler and cleaner - no silly security rules. But thanks to cluelessness of setPassword(String) in the SDK, SealedObject library design became much messier due to security rule to throw an exception whenever it encountered String instances were used to represent sensitive data.

I use Kaspersky at home. During my research, I looked up what malware Kaspersky Labs had discovered and wanted to see if they'd be bold enough to uncover any Russian state sponsored malware - there weren't any, while they did discover several with links back to NSA and Israel - interesting, but didn't think much more of it.

Best case scenario is that Kaspersky do not have ties to government, but they're not stupid enough to reveal Russian state sponsored malware either (if they did so publically, I can't imagine them being allowed to operate in Russia). What this means is you cannot count on Kaspersky to protect you from malware developed by Russian authorities (at least not until they're public knowledge), but then again, it is unlikely any commercial product would either.

Before donating to any such charities, please do a quick search with charitynavigator or charitywatch:
https://www.charitynavigator.o...
https://www.charitywatch.org/

A year or two ago Microsoft offered our company money and even some engineers to help to port our mobile product to Windows phone. Since we were really strapped for engineering resources, which we would still have to devote to the port despite the assistance, but not short on cash, we turned them down because we felt our other priorities were more important than Windows phone. We must have been the minority to do so because they were incredulous at our rejection. Just as well it seems.

It wasn't a "small" mistake.

https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/distrusting-wosign-and-startcom.html

Rockefeller family is big - note that only RFF made that announcement, not jointly with all their other funds or the foundation. It is still a grand gesture, and clearly makes a strong political statement, but I doubt the monetary impact is anywhere close to the Rockefeller foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation - Founded in 1913, this is the famous philanthropic organization set up by Senior and Junior. Endowment of 3.4 billion.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund - Founded in 1940 by the third-generation's five sons and one daughter of Junior. Endowment of 811 million.
The Rockefeller Family Fund - Founded in 1967 by members of the family's fourth-generation. Endowment ?

I strongly recommend for anyone considering a computer science degree to pick a dual major.

Mine was a hybrid telecommunications engineering and computer science degree - it was very interesting to observe those of us who clearly enjoyed programming and had the knack for it would elect for increasingly more programming and computer science oriented courses, while those who didn't had many other good course options. In our course of about 35 people, about half had the knack for programming while the other half always seem to need help.

I'm on the side of moving software engineering towards a Profession rather than Unionization.

Right or wrong my impression of unions are that they are catered towards less skilled labor, while professions require a lot more skill that can be encapsulated by many certifications. Lawyers with their bar and accountants with their CPA are examples. I've no doubt many of us can easily come up with a fairly basic curriculum for basic certification - take for example Secure Coding practices. Given how diverse and specialized a lot of our work can be, I imagine a lot of esoteric certificates can be devised. Certifications would likely need to be renewed from time to time as well, considering how quickly technologies and techniques evolve. A profession centered around good education benefits everyone.

Reading through the website, it seems the reason they're shutting down is because the current Executive Director is stepping down, and they haven't found anyone that's a good fit, or those who are a good fit don't want the job.

Reading through the job description - I think it kind of sucks. Salary 120k-160k which is apparently the market rate for this sort of position in San Francisco - doesn't seem very much. And the following paragraph jumped out:

The credit card system works pretty well - so easy to use that family members usually don't have any trouble using each other's cards. Behind the scenes however, there are comprehensive fraud detection systems, as well as clear responsibilities of fraud liability (usually card issuer).

I agree with another poster who mentioned that the onus of security should be mainly on the system - much more than the end user. What this means is that if you're going to setup any kind of password or multi-factor authentication system, it must be relatively easy to use. But then ensure there's an intrusion system in place that works in a similar manner to credit card fraud detection, where anomalies are quickly flagged and escalated for investigation.

The final project of this VLSI elective course I took required each team to build three logical modules that would work together. I was responsible for the control and integration portion bringing together all the logical modules. I spent an entire sleepless night sorting out the issues. Our team was the only one that had a functioning chip (simulated) in the end. The lecturer wasn't surprised - most chips of any reasonable complexity require A LOT of painstaking (e.g. efficient routing, interference) work to get them working - often requiring certain modules to be pulled apart (or redesigned) so they integrate better with others.

Actually, if you're willing to take a risk and join a startup and have stock options, you can stand to gain an incredible amount. Most startups fail, but finding another job shouldn't be a problem.

What I suggest is to first find a relatively large stable corporation to work for after graduation. After 3-5 years experience, join a startup (do your research on them first of course) or a relatively new company that is planning to go public, and negotiate a nice chunk of stock options. It is likely there will be many long nights at work, but the energy and vibrancy will sustain you. Don't get married too early - if the relationship gets serious, live with each other for at least two years, and get a prenup.

Best area for this sort of lifestyle is still the US west coast, home of the venture capitalists.

But as another poster noted, it helps to have a certain love for this field that extends into your personal life - technologies evolve quickly enough that you should be constantly learning. From my fifteen years plus experience as a software engineer, there are very few people who have this sort of passion. Most prefer to settle into doing the same thing day in day out - their priorities shift elsewhere like to their families - the good news is that most larger companies need people like that, and still pay a decent salary.

I wonder how many of you find the faith based approach of many audiophiles silly (or disturbing). Nevertheless, it's amazing how large the audio industry has grown, in effect selling snake oil. For those of you who have not heard of NwAvGuy, he's an electronics engineer (most likely specializing in audio) who called BS on the racket - ran his own analysis to debunk expensive headphone amplifiers, and went so far as coming up with a cheap yet excellent reference design.