roundtower, yes it was https. so it seems like a pretty convenient system.

If accepting the estimate had some sort of legal consequences (treated as if you've given them a go ahead to do some work) I don't think its acceptable.

I think it's probably very similar to storing passwords in plain text or sending them in plain text in an email. It's still very secure from an outside attack but vulnerable to malicious internal employees and indiscriminate sharing of the email.

Any of you guys on Google+? If you do and dont mind me following you please PM me your profile (would rather not post mine publicly on the forum).

I don't think it's like this at all. If a malicious employee steals your password he has persistent credentials to impersonate you in future, or could use it on other sites if you are lax on password reuse. If he steals the address to this page, he effectively has a one-time credential that only accesses information he could probably access anyway.

Ok, it's not as bad.

My biggest problem isn't in viewing the information (like you said, anyone with the url could probably see the information anyway) but if there are actions that can be taken that have significant ramifications. There's no real authorization or authentication happening here so anyone from either company that gets the url (either legitimately, looking through someone's browser history, looking through someone's email, ...) looks and is treated the same.

Actually, in my experience most phone systems say the 'pound' sign here in the US.

I've never heard bang used for that - I've heard bang to mean an exclamation point.

Now you are really confusing those of us from the UK.

As far as I know # was a longstanding symbol for pound as in weight. At least here.

So when it showed up on a phone and a computer, many of us just keep calling it pound.

I was going to ask where your hash is, but now I know:

First you put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, then you place quotation marks way up above the two? And then that enter key: Is it possible to type fast on that thing? How can you press enter without taking your fingers off the home-rows?

the euro-style keyboard makes me want to punch babies. AltGr upper-left-hand-corner to make a pipe? **** that.

what is the symbol in the far upper left hand corner, above the backtick? what is it called and what is it used for? if i type M-x that thing in emacs, does the warp core explode?

When I did a lot of work in KDE, if I recall some of the Germans wouldn't use the German layout when they were coding.

Having to alt-gr + number key to get braces made C++ too tough.

To me it looks like the pipe is lower left corner, SHIFT+\

For years I've been planning to do this, just never pulled the trigger and bought a keyboard with a proper layout, and felt it was too tough to learn it blindly. Plus I'm somewhat used to typing my braces that way. But every time I code C or Java for hours my wrist hurts so I guess that's why I try to do as much Python as possible today And it's not only braces - slash, semicolon and equals require the use of the shift key, a pipe requires AltGr. The German keyboard layout sucks for anything but writing walls of german text...

'¬' is used to mean "not" in logic expressions. Not sure if it has other meaning though.

Juk

Wow, that would be super-tilting!

Juk

it is!

didn't want to start a whole thread about this, but does anyone know of any open source poker evaluators that can determine not only what hand-type (ie, 2 pair, flush, etc) but also various draw-types (ie, flush draw, oesd, gutshot, etc)?

Never seen one of those sorry. It shouldn't be too hard to write yourself though if you have your own evaluator.

Cactus Kev's evaluator seemed like a good evaluator when I came across it a few years ago. I'm not sure how it would be used to rank draws, but you might check it out.

sup bros

any of you guys make poker apps for yourselves to gain insight into the EV of different betting lines?

I think a few people do it as a hobby...

Steve Brecher's hand evaluator lets you decode the hand type (read the comment in the header to see how):

http://www.stevebrecher.com/Software/software.html

You just need a bit of code to deal out one more card and you should have what you want.

Juk

Thanks for the reference, Juk. I'll check it out.

EDIT: which header comment are you referring to? I downloaded the java so i have the javadocs, is that what you mean?

http://www.stevebrecher.com/Software...own_source.zip

HandEval.h

As far as I can remember, none of the other public hand evaluators pack the evaluation value as nicely as this (ie: most just use uninteresting monotonically increasing/decreasing values, etc).

Juk

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrica...e2lispstor.pdf

I think someone posted this article here before, but there was a few things I wanted to ask about:

The article suggests the following:

Eric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker," and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what languages they should learn. He suggests starting with Python and Java, because they are easy to learn. The serious hacker will also want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system administration and cgi scripts. Finally, the truly serious hacker should consider learning Lisp:

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience
you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot..

Agree/disagree?

Shouldn't (ahem, header files) assembly language be in here as well?

If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they'll get the wrong candidates.
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

Mind that this guy is speaking about his experiences during the mid-90s, but I wonder if this is still pertinent today. What languages has replaced (if they have been replaced at all) Python and Perl?

I know that Python is "taught" to high-schoolers and beginning programmers because of its easy syntax, so my intuition says that it is unlikely this is something that goes for today.

If the idea is that a serious programmer would learn to use the rare and most powerful language, then what are those languages today? I mean, still, you wouldn't see someone looking for Lisp/Scheme/Racket.

He is also talking about the average use of the programmer in those languages. Rails seems unfitting here.

I figure if you are going with maximum impression, the guy who knows how to parallel is the top of today's heap?

Today, you worry about the job listings that say: "We don't care what you know. Only if you are smart."

Pretty much every company I've worked for who had stringent job qualifications were mired in bureaucracy and garbage. Large companies require Oracle DBs, Java enterprise solutions, and so forth. Startups need none of that overhead since there are usually far better alternatives to most of it.

Python is very useful since many of the future's applications and problems are computationally difficult and require a deep understanding of complex math. Since Python is well-hooked into the mathematics community, it's a great bridge between the two.

But ultimately no one cares what languages you have "experience" with. Smart hiring managers and people who will get a ton of work done will have created a portfolio of works that speaks for itself and understands how to talk to a computer. The language is almost irrelevant. But you should know your way around C++/Java to some degree, since a lot of apps more or less require that kind of closeness to the hardware. You can't just be a PHP/Rails monkey and expect to land the important jobs.

Knowing how to manipulate, store, and maintain data is very high on the list of well-paying jobs that are interesting, IMO. I am obv biased since I am a manager/director of a BI department, so that's my thing, but I see tons of jobs created in this industry with the majority of them being slaves to Microsoft SQL and other dumb solutions.