I think that I am not, but It isn't too important. It was a quite aggressive argument about physics (which I am not particularly interested in searching) where misinterpreting other's position was quite easy. Anyway, sorry for going so much off-topic and again good point about databases.
Sheesh. It was meant to be good-natured ribbing in response to your own self-deprecating follow-up to your own comment.
Sorry. I am very tired of random misunderstandings and prefer to be in the safest side, at least in public/random/ACs setups. Just look at the LOLs near all my non-evident bits! Writing all these clarifications is very far from ideal and I wouldn't do it if it wasn't required.
In any case, my point still holds: thinking that making English mistakes or even writing carelessly under these conditions has anything to do with my coding/working skills is preposterous. Despite that fact, there is a huge number of people with low-to-no technical skills (potential clients, recruiters, unexperienced programmers, etc.) whose ridiculous decisions have a negative impact on everyone; and these decisions are based upon so stupid ideas like seeing spelling/grammar errors. These people don't accept themselves and their unsuitability to assess certain knowledge; so, they rely on what they know by wrongly assuming that their expectations, fears and random assumptions have anything to do with people like me.
Excellent approach! I also tend to do same, but there are exceptions. Perhaps I made a mistake and your various interactions with me obeyed to pure randomness. Kind of weird, but possible why not? I cannot avoid remember most of nicks/signatures with which I have chatted here, but perhaps this isn't the case with everyone. Anyway, sorry if there was any misunderstanding.
No idea who Tony Stark/Ironman is... and no idea why you switch to mechanical engineers.
This comes from a previous chat with you (with that account; perhaps I am wrong to assume that only one person uses it) where you didn't know what a mechanical engineer was. I thought that Ironman was part of the popular culture which most of people know, mainly in a site for nerds. Again, accept my apologies for any misunderstanding.
Thanks for providing a real-life sample of the poor-understanding skills I was referring. You analyse my coding skills by looking at my relaxed English writing in an internet forum (or even at my English writing skills at all)! You think that the ideas in this post don't matter, just the few misspellings (properly speaking bugs, rather than monstrosities that would have been writing a completely incoherent post)! You expect the performance of a person after 21:00 (+ all the day working in a very unappealing development) to be the same than in normal work hours! All this makes loooots of sense! As much as sense as calling "bug" to letting someone into your system.
See, other AC, I know that you are kidding but have also inadvertently shown a not-appealing-to-me personality. You seem to be the kind of person who makes decisions without the required knowledge (yes, I see the irony). That's why and unfortunately for you, you should better look for someone else to take care of your code. LOL.
Note that my take about what I am describing in that previous post is that the bad ones (horrible ones, in this case, without technical skills, and also dishonest + ignorant clients losing money for crappy products) will certainly lose and that the system will sooner or later auto-correct itself. In case of being in a situation like this again, I would simply stop working with these people without being too surprised about their behaviour. I am fully focused on doing things properly, being as patient as incompetence and stupidity force me to be and by fully accepting my situation. No surprises, no disappointments, no anger (this never, other than joking), no hurry, every day higher expectations, etc. Why am I explaining all this you might ask? It is a patheticism-risk-minimisation technique. Clearer now? LOL.
Bug or glitch refer to something tiny, to the small mistakes which all we do. On the lines of showing wrong text, throwing an unhandled exception under very specific conditions or wrongly managing a specific input. But show what is being described here be called a bug? Allowing someone to enter in your highly-sensitive system?! By showing an extreme weakness in one of the most basic parts of a system which is very important for you company and which, presumably, has been built and improved for many years by very good developers? I cannot even imagine how that "bug" might look like. Were they redoing the login part and someone forgot the enable the password check?! This wouldn't be a minor problem, but almost terrorism! LOL.
I have a curious anecdote on these front which, back then, surprised me a lot but not that much lately. In any case, I was expecting a company like Google to behave a bit more professionally. Anyway, certain development team delayed the delivery of a multi-user web-based system for various months; despite that, they weren't even able to finish it and the development was passed to the next one (= myself; BTW, I was hired as a fixing-whatever guy, rather than a web developer). They said that the development was almost completed and that only some few bugs had to be fixed. At first sight, it was a quite big code, reasonably well structured and apparently working fine other than for the referred pending bugs. I started fixing bugs and everything was going fine until reaching a quite curious one. Apparently, the client (who was already starting to use that incomplete version) was seeing some weird images at very specific points. When looking into all this, I realised that all the users were sharing a big amount of (highly) private information!!!! That bunch of previous no-idea-how-to-call-them created all the interface, all the functionalities, all the nice code, documented everything, set up the login screens... and then reached a point which, apparently, they didn't know how to manage in that language (it was a.NET implementation) and just put there the first placeholder they found!!! As far as until that point the information in all the accounts was pretty much identical, everything seemed normal!! Incredible! They might have copy/paste or emulate or no idea what most of the common parts, but without really knowing what they were doing! And it was a team with more than 5 people (designers included).
This article and some comments in yesterday's one about web developers repeating security problems reminded me that experience. I do also recall that then I wasn't even sure about what expression should I use to describe that monstrosity! Bug? How could I use the same name for a normal output of almost any development than for what I cannot imagine that I could ever do! How could I continue working as a programmer (or even living! LOL) after having done something like that?! This isn't an error, a bug, something which might be somehow understandable. There is no explanation, justification, not even a designation accurately describing what I am referring in the previous paragraph. The funniest part is that that team has most likely continued working, even with that same client. Also, that client didn't understand even 1% of what I explained and, for him, this was just another bug! What a world/market place we live in!
As far as you had some problems in the past to understand what a mechanical (industrial) engineer is, here you have what seems a clear enough example: Tony Stark/Ironman, in case of being real, making real things and having real knowledge would be a mechanical engineer; or, at least, would have an important mechanical engineering expertise.
I want also to clarify that my opinion about you hasn't changed much; I still don't quite understand why you are so interested in talking to me, mainly after some past incidents. On the other hand, I am a resentment-free guy always ready to update my impressions if required; I do expect everyone to take full responsibility for past actions though, more out of fairness than resentment. In case of thinking that your comments are reasonable, I might reply you and keep changing my opinion; otherwise, I will continue ignoring you as so far, something which I only do under extreme circumstances.
Instead of having different DB users with rights to change the schema and rights to only query data, they have a single super user that nearly can do everything.
For the record and in case anyone is interested, I am not a web developer in the sense of mostly having web-based experience. I specialise in (custom & from-scratch) algorithm development, numerical/engineering/data analysis and efficiency improvement, where the exact language or framework (desktop, web or whatever) is quite irrelevant. Anecdotally, most of my experience is focused on desktop environments (Windows and Linux).
Here you have some ideas for those talking about SQL injection without knowing too well what all this is about. There are two basic requisites for this situation to ever occur: 1. Non-sanitised string SQL query (= sending a random string to the database without checking what is in there). 2. The potentiality of a malicious action to happen (e.g., building the SQL queries from random user inputs).
If any of the aforementioned points is missing, the probability of a SQL injection to ever occur is exactly zero. What means that you can ignore the first point and blindly send queries to a SQL database (not precisely recommendable) if, for example, all the strings are hardcoded or no external actions will ever affect any of them. Similarly, you might rely on random inputs, as far as you make sure that the resulting SQL query is fine; focusing on this second aspect is the most usual proceeding. Again, I am not recommending or promoting to rely on non-ideal proceedings, just sharing some basic, objective, fanatic-free information which some people (some of them with lots to say in programming-related aspects! Incredible, but true!) might find helpful. Long live to the little bobby tables! LOL.
It seems quite sensible to assume that more experienced developers are way more likely to deliver better code than less experienced ones, so your general statement is certainly wrong. If you want to make generalisations (I don't like that too much though), note that most of the problems in programming and virtually everywhere else are likely to be caused by ignorance, short-sightedness and lack of experience. In programming, all these "features" are very common among newbies, non-technical staff making decisions without having a proper understanding of what they are doing and similar. I think that all this is extremely evident and is not the main reason why I am replying to you, but what is written below.
it was littered with string concatenations to build SQL queries,
I will never defend a-priori non-ideal approaches or code (and programmers) about which I know nothing. But I will always criticise blind trust in anything, including what seem better proceedings. SQL injection isn't more than an output of a behaviour which might be described as not having the situation controlled. It belongs to the same category that type-mismatches, boundary overflows and other errors appearing in algorithms where certain scenarios aren't properly accounted. The person writing SQL-injection-vulnerable code is extremely likely to have written many other wrong parts. These codes are created by people not understanding the underlying functionalities (how SQL databases work), not putting too much effort/care on that code or wishing things to be in certain way without confirming/dismissing that issue. Writing connect_to_db("string variable not sanitised") is pretty much the same than NumericType var = "non-numeric-type".
A developer not understanding, applying, accepting the aforementioned ideas everywhere and just focusing on blindly repeating whatever approach might sound better for that situation is extremely likely to provoke other problems. I am fully aware about how to use parameterised SQL queries in any language (= knowing it right away or spending 5-10 seconds researching it) and the (dis)advantages of relying on many other approaches (e.g., specific vs. generic types); and I might choose one approach or the other depending upon the scenario. In fact, I tend to rely on string concatenation for SQL-query building. Nothing of that has absolutely any influence on the resulting applications (safe, reliable and efficient) or the generated code (well-structured, commented and usually scalable); because I know what I am doing, because I am experienced and sensible enough to not blindly apply and trust in generic anything, because I do have a full control over the code which I write, all its inputs/outputs and because creating a proper piece of software can be accomplished in an infinite number of different ways, many of them identically good.
When you forget about all that (having the proper result you are looking for) and start focusing on irrelevant issues (worrying about making sure that you apply certain proceeding for no good reason), you might have to start rethinking a bit some of your ideas. There are lots of people systematically looking for impossible shortcuts; seriously thinking that there are generic, easy, always-working answers for complex problems; that top-quality knowledge, reliability, dependability might be easily and quickly achieved, even in something as wide and complex as programming. The reality is that all these people are extremely wrong and will only be provoking problems to themselves and others. The only way to have good skills in something as programming is time, dedication and certain basic background/personality. There is no alternative, no shortcut, no magical solution, no combination of words proving otherwise, no genius intuitively-understanding everything, no set of written-in-stone rules which will always work. On the other hand, there are lots of short-sighted people (some of them quite aggressive), lots of lies, people in denial, incompetence, unfair blaming, stupid decisions and some ignorance-prone trends which hopefully will gradually get extincted.
I don't know how the big houses do it, but one of the common tools is multi-dimensional spreadsheets which can let you easily run sensitivity analysis on various permutations.
This is a quite common practice in small stock-trading companies everywhere. I have performed some works on these lines mostly focused on implementing or extending algorithms via Excel, VBA or external applications in any programming language but usually writing to/reading from spreadsheets. Every time under quite rushed and rigid conditions not letting me do any kind of improvement on any front. That nonsense of people not-knowing constraining the work of those knowing seems to be quite common in the stock trading programming sub-world!
My overall impression was that most of these approaches were too messy, built over the years under non-ideal conditions, difficult to validate, improve, fix, etc. The input systems were particularly bad because of requiring people to perform many relatively simple actions, what seemed very tiring, non-optimal and too prone to errors. Despite not being a GUI expert, I do tend to build user-friendly input systems, have some experience in data management and am fully aware about how beneficial can be for people's performance something as simple as reducing the number of input actions per page.
I never worked on one of these systems and had the impression that someone did spend quality time/effort in coming up with a proper, user-friendly approach which might be used/fixed by anyone else. From all those experiences, I think that there is a quite big space for improvement among trading companies regarding automation and quality of the software/algorithms. In any case, all this happened some years ago and now I am exclusively interested in calmed, properly-appraising and letting-me-do-my-thing clients.
Being able to adequately determine whatever you are looking for or exactly the contrary is pretty much the same in most of cases, programming among them. Defining normal is a necessary requisite before knowing what an anomaly is. You can only tell what is wrong within a specific context, which is usually defined according to a set of patterns.
CLARIFICATION: just in case anyone has even the slightest doubt about it, note that I expressly wrote "values"/"knowledge" to denote that I don't think that the commonly-understood meanings of these two expressions are fully applicable in that context. I use double quotes for two purposes: including external excerpts and indicating the aforementioned kind-of-sarcastic intention. Most of people should be able to immediately understand what is applicable in each case from the given context, but I am currently in a clarifying-even-the-simplest-bit-to-avoid-unnecessarily-wasting-time-by-addressing-stupid-concerns-from-random-idiots mode and that's why this ideally-unnecessary clarification.
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Just out of curiosity, at what are you better than most of people other than that? From your post, I understand that you consider a web developer equivalent to any other programmer (including the referred WS researchers here and the developers creating the corresponding pieces of so-called AI). You also seem to assume that developers cannot work for themselves, a magic which seems only reserved to low-specialisation workers like plumbers. You seem to also consider most of the financial-related works redundant (I am not completely against this one. LOL). On the other hand, you also seem to think that automation will be very important, even though you don't seem to be aware about the fact that highly-specialised people (programmers, engineers, even bankers for providing the underlying information) are required to build/fix/extend those systems.
So, my question is: what do you do for work or, at least, what is your main speciality? On what should I focus my attention to apply the underlying ideas to your signature and think about what might be a good justification for you writing that post? Apparently, I cannot criticise your English (what, on the other hand, I wouldn't ever dare to do) because you could criticise my German (which is quite bad BTW), right? So, what can you offer on the work/understanding/general talking front on exchange of your post? Please, don't have any problem in being as detailed as possible. I would love to know about the kind of tasks which a person with your ideas can perform much better than me/other highly-specialised workers and which will never be automated.
CLARIFICATION: although I have always tried to use most of my a-bit-aggressive replies here in reactions to previous attacks, I read lots of nonsense in yesterday's thread about Catalonia and haven't been able to refrain myself:)
As I understand from the summary, Wall Street (whatever that term is exactly involving) research seems to refer to collecting and analysing big amounts of data. I also understand that these analyses are quite simplistic, as far as otherwise AI (whatever they are exactly meaning with that) wouldn't be able to deal with it. So, my question is: how are they performing these tasks at the moment? Manually? Any even slightly knowledgeable (and/or with money to hire someone even slightly knowledgeable) person should be relying on software to perform virtually any simplistic enough data analysis action since quite a few years ago. Usually, people take only care of tasks which are too complex to be automated, perhaps generally or perhaps only under the given conditions in the sense of not being worth the effort/investment.
Either Wall Street is using very inefficient approaches/hasn't discovered software yet or this is a new blown-out-of-proportion ridiculous claim made by and for people whose knowledge about all this mostly consists in repeating a word which they are hearing a lot lately. I will not give my personal opinion regarding the most likely explanation by bearing in mind my previous experience with people/companies who might be considered part of what Wall Street represents or share its "values"/"knowledge". If I cared about any of this (which I don't), it would certainly be positive news for me because I am a programmer and, although some of the people systematically repeating terms like AI might not be completely aware about that fact, we are the ones giving birth to that ugly baby. LOL.
That previous post is also kind of relevant for the recent news about Catalonia. BTW, after taking a quick look at that other thread, I have preferred to not participate there (way above the maximum level of ignorance which I am willing to tolerate) and rather go back to continue enjoying the jokes in Twitter. LOL.
Most of the actions provoking, supporting and further extending inequity and rich people getting richer are usually performed by reasonably poor, even very poor people. Lots of examples: the ones coming up with systems to evade taxes, performing not-too-honest actions on any front, convincing other poor people about supporting whatever, the ones harassing me to repay loans, etc. In fact, this sub-type of poor people are usually very greedy, unfair/dishonest and feel unmotivated fears to lose their small amount of belongings. An even further ironical issue is that they seem to perform all these actions with the blind conviction of doing the right thing. In fact, they seem to want to be played, to be lied on their faces and to feel that their efforts to make rich people even richer makes sense. They don't seem to accept and like their actual situation (happy/proud poor); most of their actions seem to be directed towards creating the fake appearance of richness, something which they have never and will ever enjoy but which they have been convinced into believing that is the best thing ever. They are usually very aggressive and disrespectful with people in their or worse situation, even just with hypocrisy-free attitudes; they also seem to assume that everyone else have that same approach to life.
Disproportionate richness does certainly come from unreasonable greediness, but most of it from the actual executors of the required unfairness allowing such a situation to happen: poor people. The ones who have been brainwashed into thinking that getting rich at any cost is the most important thing; that rich people deserve better (and really care about them!); that they have to renounce to a lot just to gain the right to join the born-here-members-only elitist club (a tremendous lie: they will never be allowed in). Modern societies and, lately, the huge amount of misinformation and poor-quality knowledge via internet, have turned intrinsically happy people (the most numerous ones, those having the less, but enjoying, sharing and contributing the most) into sad pawns showing what they don’t have, aspiring to what they will never get and only benefiting those who will never care about them. Their blind acceptation of all this is precisely what allows such a nonsensical reality to even exist. They are the ones voluntarily fearing, attacking and feeling attacked by anyone/anything, being systematically manipulated and always appraising those telling them the lies which they want to listen. Rather than making an effort to feel better about themselves, they freely contribute to unfairly increase the self-esteem of people who will never do anything for them.
Some of the previous posts refer to violence, revolution and similar anachronisms. This isn't the way to fight the problem (at least not in peaceful and reasonably rich countries) because the required imposed oppression doesn’t exist; there is only freely-accepted oppression whose power grows at the expense of those unaware voluntaries. Do you want to contribute towards reducing inequality and unfairness? Accept yourself and your position in the system. Enjoy what you have and make others enjoy. Be happy and make others happy. Don't envy or wish what you don't even know what is and never have unhealthy aspirations. Don't let others trick you for their own gain. Understand and try to understand others. Don't look for easy answers and magical solutions for your problems. Don't fear or hate by default. Accept that you will never get anything for free. Don't blame others for what is your fault either directly or indirectly via lack of acceptation/understanding.
Although I am kind of (always living in relatively rich countries and having enjoyed quite a few opportunities) poor, I have met a quite relevant number of reasonably rich people at different stages of my life. I have even met some people who are likely to become very powerful within the long term, in the sense of making decisions affecting a relevant number of others. I am not exactly the envi
Thanks for sharing your profounds insights about this article, my comments and even life itself. I am so grateful for having been granted this opportunity to enjoy your wisdom that I am feeling almost like crying. I look forward to your next mind-blowing lesson, professor. LOL.
people who have never read slashdot and see if they can come up with better headlines.
My whole point was that the used methodology is objectively not in a position to deliver a proper understanding of the situation (= to actually summarise what has been happening during the last years in somehow meaningful headlines). It can deliver the most commonly used words or combinations of them, what might be useful for naming a band or a colour but not so much for the title of an article. A better version would have been one able to dismiss incoherent or meaningless sentences. Even people with low technical knowledge will never come up with sentences like "Microsoft To Develop Programming Law" or "More Pong Users for Kernel Project". Something like "Microsoft Sues Everyone" does denote a basic understanding of the constituent words.
If you train your algorithm with whatever raw data, you would get whatever result. Even a model perfectly analysing the given situation becomes useless when not being adequately trained. In this specific case, the problem is clear: that tool was designed to deal with a different type of scenarios. Coming up with names for objects by training the program with many other names of equivalent objects makes perfect sense. Trying to figure out the best title for an article by analysing a big number of past titles about different subjects makes no sense at all.
The only sensible proceeding in this specific case would have been to rely on a tool able to reasonably analyse article contents and accurately determine the associated title; also to analyse a big amount of contents and output a good summary for them. You train that tool with all the articles during the last years, such that it can come up with the best summary and generate a title from that summary. If they did that, the training might have been considered acceptably good and the accuracy of the used model might have been properly assessed. Under the current conditions, these results don't differ much from the generation of random words.
I don't know about Megabots but Kuratas actually sells their robots on Amazon for about 1 million dollars.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%2...... [amazon.co.jp]
Are there people willing to pay $1 million for that robot?! Wow!! In any case, this does seem like a reasonably profitable business model. Just building the robots which you can sell sounds still a bit weird but at least makes some sense.
I can see them renting their robots for various shows, I think Megabots and Kuratas both do this. The duel is just advertisement.
I visited the Megabots website, their Kickstarter page and did a quick research and couldn't find any reference to sales; they are mostly referring to the future of robot fights, videos and merchandising. I don't know how things are in Japan, but it doesn't seem that this kind of product (at $1 million!!) has an actual market in the USA (or almost anywhere).
CLARIFICATION: I think that all my bad experiences with these stupid, lending-a-bit-of-money-unreasonably-pushing-and-losing-everything mobster-wannabes have been very positive for me. They have completely opened my eyes on quite a few fronts. Actually, my current clarity of ideas owes quite a lot to all this (and other) pushy people. I used to be too understanding, generous and to expect too much from virtually anyone; that behaviour used to make me waste lots of energy and to be systematically disappointed. Now, I am sure that some people cannot understand/appreciate things as I do, that their whole world means nothing to me, and this helps me to focus my efforts on what/who really matters to me. I am not trying to be cynical or to generically criticise a huge number of people; I am just clearly describing my ideas, what I don't like and what will never tolerate. Note that I have always had a live-and-let-live kind of approach and that, other than for being a descriptive example to help explain my point, I don't care about that company, their expectations and how they get their money.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, you are most certainly mixing me up.
I think that I am not, but It isn't too important. It was a quite aggressive argument about physics (which I am not particularly interested in searching) where misinterpreting other's position was quite easy. Anyway, sorry for going so much off-topic and again good point about databases.
Sheesh. It was meant to be good-natured ribbing in response to your own self-deprecating follow-up to your own comment.
Sorry. I am very tired of random misunderstandings and prefer to be in the safest side, at least in public/random/ACs setups. Just look at the LOLs near all my non-evident bits! Writing all these clarifications is very far from ideal and I wouldn't do it if it wasn't required.
In any case, my point still holds: thinking that making English mistakes or even writing carelessly under these conditions has anything to do with my coding/working skills is preposterous. Despite that fact, there is a huge number of people with low-to-no technical skills (potential clients, recruiters, unexperienced programmers, etc.) whose ridiculous decisions have a negative impact on everyone; and these decisions are based upon so stupid ideas like seeing spelling/grammar errors. These people don't accept themselves and their unsuitability to assess certain knowledge; so, they rely on what they know by wrongly assuming that their expectations, fears and random assumptions have anything to do with people like me.
I read text ... and answer to text.
Excellent approach! I also tend to do same, but there are exceptions. Perhaps I made a mistake and your various interactions with me obeyed to pure randomness. Kind of weird, but possible why not? I cannot avoid remember most of nicks/signatures with which I have chatted here, but perhaps this isn't the case with everyone. Anyway, sorry if there was any misunderstanding.
No idea who Tony Stark/Ironman is ... and no idea why you switch to mechanical engineers.
This comes from a previous chat with you (with that account; perhaps I am wrong to assume that only one person uses it) where you didn't know what a mechanical engineer was. I thought that Ironman was part of the popular culture which most of people know, mainly in a site for nerds. Again, accept my apologies for any misunderstanding.
And you want to write our code!?
Thanks for providing a real-life sample of the poor-understanding skills I was referring. You analyse my coding skills by looking at my relaxed English writing in an internet forum (or even at my English writing skills at all)! You think that the ideas in this post don't matter, just the few misspellings (properly speaking bugs, rather than monstrosities that would have been writing a completely incoherent post)! You expect the performance of a person after 21:00 (+ all the day working in a very unappealing development) to be the same than in normal work hours! All this makes loooots of sense! As much as sense as calling "bug" to letting someone into your system.
See, other AC, I know that you are kidding but have also inadvertently shown a not-appealing-to-me personality. You seem to be the kind of person who makes decisions without the required knowledge (yes, I see the irony). That's why and unfortunately for you, you should better look for someone else to take care of your code. LOL.
Note that my take about what I am describing in that previous post is that the bad ones (horrible ones, in this case, without technical skills, and also dishonest + ignorant clients losing money for crappy products) will certainly lose and that the system will sooner or later auto-correct itself. In case of being in a situation like this again, I would simply stop working with these people without being too surprised about their behaviour. I am fully focused on doing things properly, being as patient as incompetence and stupidity force me to be and by fully accepting my situation. No surprises, no disappointments, no anger (this never, other than joking), no hurry, every day higher expectations, etc. Why am I explaining all this you might ask? It is a patheticism-risk-minimisation technique. Clearer now? LOL.
Note to myself: when posting in the late afternoon, I should do an additional proofreading effort because I make too many mistakes :)
Bug or glitch refer to something tiny, to the small mistakes which all we do. On the lines of showing wrong text, throwing an unhandled exception under very specific conditions or wrongly managing a specific input. But show what is being described here be called a bug? Allowing someone to enter in your highly-sensitive system?! By showing an extreme weakness in one of the most basic parts of a system which is very important for you company and which, presumably, has been built and improved for many years by very good developers? I cannot even imagine how that "bug" might look like. Were they redoing the login part and someone forgot the enable the password check?! This wouldn't be a minor problem, but almost terrorism! LOL.
.NET implementation) and just put there the first placeholder they found!!! As far as until that point the information in all the accounts was pretty much identical, everything seemed normal!! Incredible! They might have copy/paste or emulate or no idea what most of the common parts, but without really knowing what they were doing! And it was a team with more than 5 people (designers included).
I have a curious anecdote on these front which, back then, surprised me a lot but not that much lately. In any case, I was expecting a company like Google to behave a bit more professionally. Anyway, certain development team delayed the delivery of a multi-user web-based system for various months; despite that, they weren't even able to finish it and the development was passed to the next one (= myself; BTW, I was hired as a fixing-whatever guy, rather than a web developer). They said that the development was almost completed and that only some few bugs had to be fixed. At first sight, it was a quite big code, reasonably well structured and apparently working fine other than for the referred pending bugs. I started fixing bugs and everything was going fine until reaching a quite curious one. Apparently, the client (who was already starting to use that incomplete version) was seeing some weird images at very specific points. When looking into all this, I realised that all the users were sharing a big amount of (highly) private information!!!! That bunch of previous no-idea-how-to-call-them created all the interface, all the functionalities, all the nice code, documented everything, set up the login screens... and then reached a point which, apparently, they didn't know how to manage in that language (it was a
This article and some comments in yesterday's one about web developers repeating security problems reminded me that experience. I do also recall that then I wasn't even sure about what expression should I use to describe that monstrosity! Bug? How could I use the same name for a normal output of almost any development than for what I cannot imagine that I could ever do! How could I continue working as a programmer (or even living! LOL) after having done something like that?! This isn't an error, a bug, something which might be somehow understandable. There is no explanation, justification, not even a designation accurately describing what I am referring in the previous paragraph. The funniest part is that that team has most likely continued working, even with that same client. Also, that client didn't understand even 1% of what I explained and, for him, this was just another bug! What a world/market place we live in!
As far as you had some problems in the past to understand what a mechanical (industrial) engineer is, here you have what seems a clear enough example: Tony Stark/Ironman, in case of being real, making real things and having real knowledge would be a mechanical engineer; or, at least, would have an important mechanical engineering expertise.
I want also to clarify that my opinion about you hasn't changed much; I still don't quite understand why you are so interested in talking to me, mainly after some past incidents. On the other hand, I am a resentment-free guy always ready to update my impressions if required; I do expect everyone to take full responsibility for past actions though, more out of fairness than resentment. In case of thinking that your comments are reasonable, I might reply you and keep changing my opinion; otherwise, I will continue ignoring you as so far, something which I only do under extreme circumstances.
Instead of having different DB users with rights to change the schema and rights to only query data, they have a single super user that nearly can do everything.
Good point.
For the record and in case anyone is interested, I am not a web developer in the sense of mostly having web-based experience. I specialise in (custom & from-scratch) algorithm development, numerical/engineering/data analysis and efficiency improvement, where the exact language or framework (desktop, web or whatever) is quite irrelevant. Anecdotally, most of my experience is focused on desktop environments (Windows and Linux).
Here you have some ideas for those talking about SQL injection without knowing too well what all this is about. There are two basic requisites for this situation to ever occur:
1. Non-sanitised string SQL query (= sending a random string to the database without checking what is in there).
2. The potentiality of a malicious action to happen (e.g., building the SQL queries from random user inputs).
If any of the aforementioned points is missing, the probability of a SQL injection to ever occur is exactly zero. What means that you can ignore the first point and blindly send queries to a SQL database (not precisely recommendable) if, for example, all the strings are hardcoded or no external actions will ever affect any of them. Similarly, you might rely on random inputs, as far as you make sure that the resulting SQL query is fine; focusing on this second aspect is the most usual proceeding. Again, I am not recommending or promoting to rely on non-ideal proceedings, just sharing some basic, objective, fanatic-free information which some people (some of them with lots to say in programming-related aspects! Incredible, but true!) might find helpful. Long live to the little bobby tables! LOL.
Absolutely not caused by newbies.
It seems quite sensible to assume that more experienced developers are way more likely to deliver better code than less experienced ones, so your general statement is certainly wrong. If you want to make generalisations (I don't like that too much though), note that most of the problems in programming and virtually everywhere else are likely to be caused by ignorance, short-sightedness and lack of experience. In programming, all these "features" are very common among newbies, non-technical staff making decisions without having a proper understanding of what they are doing and similar. I think that all this is extremely evident and is not the main reason why I am replying to you, but what is written below.
it was littered with string concatenations to build SQL queries,
I will never defend a-priori non-ideal approaches or code (and programmers) about which I know nothing. But I will always criticise blind trust in anything, including what seem better proceedings. SQL injection isn't more than an output of a behaviour which might be described as not having the situation controlled. It belongs to the same category that type-mismatches, boundary overflows and other errors appearing in algorithms where certain scenarios aren't properly accounted. The person writing SQL-injection-vulnerable code is extremely likely to have written many other wrong parts. These codes are created by people not understanding the underlying functionalities (how SQL databases work), not putting too much effort/care on that code or wishing things to be in certain way without confirming/dismissing that issue. Writing connect_to_db("string variable not sanitised") is pretty much the same than NumericType var = "non-numeric-type".
A developer not understanding, applying, accepting the aforementioned ideas everywhere and just focusing on blindly repeating whatever approach might sound better for that situation is extremely likely to provoke other problems. I am fully aware about how to use parameterised SQL queries in any language (= knowing it right away or spending 5-10 seconds researching it) and the (dis)advantages of relying on many other approaches (e.g., specific vs. generic types); and I might choose one approach or the other depending upon the scenario. In fact, I tend to rely on string concatenation for SQL-query building. Nothing of that has absolutely any influence on the resulting applications (safe, reliable and efficient) or the generated code (well-structured, commented and usually scalable); because I know what I am doing, because I am experienced and sensible enough to not blindly apply and trust in generic anything, because I do have a full control over the code which I write, all its inputs/outputs and because creating a proper piece of software can be accomplished in an infinite number of different ways, many of them identically good.
When you forget about all that (having the proper result you are looking for) and start focusing on irrelevant issues (worrying about making sure that you apply certain proceeding for no good reason), you might have to start rethinking a bit some of your ideas. There are lots of people systematically looking for impossible shortcuts; seriously thinking that there are generic, easy, always-working answers for complex problems; that top-quality knowledge, reliability, dependability might be easily and quickly achieved, even in something as wide and complex as programming. The reality is that all these people are extremely wrong and will only be provoking problems to themselves and others. The only way to have good skills in something as programming is time, dedication and certain basic background/personality. There is no alternative, no shortcut, no magical solution, no combination of words proving otherwise, no genius intuitively-understanding everything, no set of written-in-stone rules which will always work. On the other hand, there are lots of short-sighted people (some of them quite aggressive), lots of lies, people in denial, incompetence, unfair blaming, stupid decisions and some ignorance-prone trends which hopefully will gradually get extincted.
I don't know how the big houses do it, but one of the common tools is multi-dimensional spreadsheets which can let you easily run sensitivity analysis on various permutations.
This is a quite common practice in small stock-trading companies everywhere. I have performed some works on these lines mostly focused on implementing or extending algorithms via Excel, VBA or external applications in any programming language but usually writing to/reading from spreadsheets. Every time under quite rushed and rigid conditions not letting me do any kind of improvement on any front. That nonsense of people not-knowing constraining the work of those knowing seems to be quite common in the stock trading programming sub-world!
My overall impression was that most of these approaches were too messy, built over the years under non-ideal conditions, difficult to validate, improve, fix, etc. The input systems were particularly bad because of requiring people to perform many relatively simple actions, what seemed very tiring, non-optimal and too prone to errors. Despite not being a GUI expert, I do tend to build user-friendly input systems, have some experience in data management and am fully aware about how beneficial can be for people's performance something as simple as reducing the number of input actions per page.
I never worked on one of these systems and had the impression that someone did spend quality time/effort in coming up with a proper, user-friendly approach which might be used/fixed by anyone else. From all those experiences, I think that there is a quite big space for improvement among trading companies regarding automation and quality of the software/algorithms. In any case, all this happened some years ago and now I am exclusively interested in calmed, properly-appraising and letting-me-do-my-thing clients.
Often it's anomalies you're interested in.
Being able to adequately determine whatever you are looking for or exactly the contrary is pretty much the same in most of cases, programming among them. Defining normal is a necessary requisite before knowing what an anomaly is. You can only tell what is wrong within a specific context, which is usually defined according to a set of patterns.
CLARIFICATION: just in case anyone has even the slightest doubt about it, note that I expressly wrote "values"/"knowledge" to denote that I don't think that the commonly-understood meanings of these two expressions are fully applicable in that context. I use double quotes for two purposes: including external excerpts and indicating the aforementioned kind-of-sarcastic intention. Most of people should be able to immediately understand what is applicable in each case from the given context, but I am currently in a clarifying-even-the-simplest-bit-to-avoid-unnecessarily-wasting-time-by-addressing-stupid-concerns-from-random-idiots mode and that's why this ideally-unnecessary clarification.
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Just out of curiosity, at what are you better than most of people other than that? From your post, I understand that you consider a web developer equivalent to any other programmer (including the referred WS researchers here and the developers creating the corresponding pieces of so-called AI). You also seem to assume that developers cannot work for themselves, a magic which seems only reserved to low-specialisation workers like plumbers. You seem to also consider most of the financial-related works redundant (I am not completely against this one. LOL). On the other hand, you also seem to think that automation will be very important, even though you don't seem to be aware about the fact that highly-specialised people (programmers, engineers, even bankers for providing the underlying information) are required to build/fix/extend those systems.
:)
So, my question is: what do you do for work or, at least, what is your main speciality? On what should I focus my attention to apply the underlying ideas to your signature and think about what might be a good justification for you writing that post? Apparently, I cannot criticise your English (what, on the other hand, I wouldn't ever dare to do) because you could criticise my German (which is quite bad BTW), right? So, what can you offer on the work/understanding/general talking front on exchange of your post? Please, don't have any problem in being as detailed as possible. I would love to know about the kind of tasks which a person with your ideas can perform much better than me/other highly-specialised workers and which will never be automated.
CLARIFICATION: although I have always tried to use most of my a-bit-aggressive replies here in reactions to previous attacks, I read lots of nonsense in yesterday's thread about Catalonia and haven't been able to refrain myself
As I understand from the summary, Wall Street (whatever that term is exactly involving) research seems to refer to collecting and analysing big amounts of data. I also understand that these analyses are quite simplistic, as far as otherwise AI (whatever they are exactly meaning with that) wouldn't be able to deal with it. So, my question is: how are they performing these tasks at the moment? Manually? Any even slightly knowledgeable (and/or with money to hire someone even slightly knowledgeable) person should be relying on software to perform virtually any simplistic enough data analysis action since quite a few years ago. Usually, people take only care of tasks which are too complex to be automated, perhaps generally or perhaps only under the given conditions in the sense of not being worth the effort/investment.
Either Wall Street is using very inefficient approaches/hasn't discovered software yet or this is a new blown-out-of-proportion ridiculous claim made by and for people whose knowledge about all this mostly consists in repeating a word which they are hearing a lot lately. I will not give my personal opinion regarding the most likely explanation by bearing in mind my previous experience with people/companies who might be considered part of what Wall Street represents or share its "values"/"knowledge". If I cared about any of this (which I don't), it would certainly be positive news for me because I am a programmer and, although some of the people systematically repeating terms like AI might not be completely aware about that fact, we are the ones giving birth to that ugly baby. LOL.
That previous post is also kind of relevant for the recent news about Catalonia. BTW, after taking a quick look at that other thread, I have preferred to not participate there (way above the maximum level of ignorance which I am willing to tolerate) and rather go back to continue enjoying the jokes in Twitter. LOL.
Most of the actions provoking, supporting and further extending inequity and rich people getting richer are usually performed by reasonably poor, even very poor people. Lots of examples: the ones coming up with systems to evade taxes, performing not-too-honest actions on any front, convincing other poor people about supporting whatever, the ones harassing me to repay loans, etc. In fact, this sub-type of poor people are usually very greedy, unfair/dishonest and feel unmotivated fears to lose their small amount of belongings. An even further ironical issue is that they seem to perform all these actions with the blind conviction of doing the right thing. In fact, they seem to want to be played, to be lied on their faces and to feel that their efforts to make rich people even richer makes sense. They don't seem to accept and like their actual situation (happy/proud poor); most of their actions seem to be directed towards creating the fake appearance of richness, something which they have never and will ever enjoy but which they have been convinced into believing that is the best thing ever. They are usually very aggressive and disrespectful with people in their or worse situation, even just with hypocrisy-free attitudes; they also seem to assume that everyone else have that same approach to life.
Disproportionate richness does certainly come from unreasonable greediness, but most of it from the actual executors of the required unfairness allowing such a situation to happen: poor people. The ones who have been brainwashed into thinking that getting rich at any cost is the most important thing; that rich people deserve better (and really care about them!); that they have to renounce to a lot just to gain the right to join the born-here-members-only elitist club (a tremendous lie: they will never be allowed in). Modern societies and, lately, the huge amount of misinformation and poor-quality knowledge via internet, have turned intrinsically happy people (the most numerous ones, those having the less, but enjoying, sharing and contributing the most) into sad pawns showing what they don’t have, aspiring to what they will never get and only benefiting those who will never care about them. Their blind acceptation of all this is precisely what allows such a nonsensical reality to even exist. They are the ones voluntarily fearing, attacking and feeling attacked by anyone/anything, being systematically manipulated and always appraising those telling them the lies which they want to listen. Rather than making an effort to feel better about themselves, they freely contribute to unfairly increase the self-esteem of people who will never do anything for them.
Some of the previous posts refer to violence, revolution and similar anachronisms. This isn't the way to fight the problem (at least not in peaceful and reasonably rich countries) because the required imposed oppression doesn’t exist; there is only freely-accepted oppression whose power grows at the expense of those unaware voluntaries. Do you want to contribute towards reducing inequality and unfairness? Accept yourself and your position in the system. Enjoy what you have and make others enjoy. Be happy and make others happy. Don't envy or wish what you don't even know what is and never have unhealthy aspirations. Don't let others trick you for their own gain. Understand and try to understand others. Don't look for easy answers and magical solutions for your problems. Don't fear or hate by default. Accept that you will never get anything for free. Don't blame others for what is your fault either directly or indirectly via lack of acceptation/understanding.
Although I am kind of (always living in relatively rich countries and having enjoyed quite a few opportunities) poor, I have met a quite relevant number of reasonably rich people at different stages of my life. I have even met some people who are likely to become very powerful within the long term, in the sense of making decisions affecting a relevant number of others. I am not exactly the envi
Thanks for sharing your profounds insights about this article, my comments and even life itself. I am so grateful for having been granted this opportunity to enjoy your wisdom that I am feeling almost like crying. I look forward to your next mind-blowing lesson, professor. LOL.
people who have never read slashdot and see if they can come up with better headlines.
My whole point was that the used methodology is objectively not in a position to deliver a proper understanding of the situation (= to actually summarise what has been happening during the last years in somehow meaningful headlines). It can deliver the most commonly used words or combinations of them, what might be useful for naming a band or a colour but not so much for the title of an article. A better version would have been one able to dismiss incoherent or meaningless sentences. Even people with low technical knowledge will never come up with sentences like "Microsoft To Develop Programming Law" or "More Pong Users for Kernel Project". Something like "Microsoft Sues Everyone" does denote a basic understanding of the constituent words.
Well, isn't that the essence of Slashdot ?
In that case, I correct my statement: this is a perfect result! Excellent work! LOL.
If you train your algorithm with whatever raw data, you would get whatever result. Even a model perfectly analysing the given situation becomes useless when not being adequately trained. In this specific case, the problem is clear: that tool was designed to deal with a different type of scenarios. Coming up with names for objects by training the program with many other names of equivalent objects makes perfect sense. Trying to figure out the best title for an article by analysing a big number of past titles about different subjects makes no sense at all.
The only sensible proceeding in this specific case would have been to rely on a tool able to reasonably analyse article contents and accurately determine the associated title; also to analyse a big amount of contents and output a good summary for them. You train that tool with all the articles during the last years, such that it can come up with the best summary and generate a title from that summary. If they did that, the training might have been considered acceptably good and the accuracy of the used model might have been properly assessed. Under the current conditions, these results don't differ much from the generation of random words.
I don't know about Megabots but Kuratas actually sells their robots on Amazon for about 1 million dollars. https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%2...... [amazon.co.jp]
Are there people willing to pay $1 million for that robot?! Wow!! In any case, this does seem like a reasonably profitable business model. Just building the robots which you can sell sounds still a bit weird but at least makes some sense.
I can see them renting their robots for various shows, I think Megabots and Kuratas both do this. The duel is just advertisement.
I visited the Megabots website, their Kickstarter page and did a quick research and couldn't find any reference to sales; they are mostly referring to the future of robot fights, videos and merchandising. I don't know how things are in Japan, but it doesn't seem that this kind of product (at $1 million!!) has an actual market in the USA (or almost anywhere).
CLARIFICATION: I think that all my bad experiences with these stupid, lending-a-bit-of-money-unreasonably-pushing-and-losing-everything mobster-wannabes have been very positive for me. They have completely opened my eyes on quite a few fronts. Actually, my current clarity of ideas owes quite a lot to all this (and other) pushy people. I used to be too understanding, generous and to expect too much from virtually anyone; that behaviour used to make me waste lots of energy and to be systematically disappointed. Now, I am sure that some people cannot understand/appreciate things as I do, that their whole world means nothing to me, and this helps me to focus my efforts on what/who really matters to me. I am not trying to be cynical or to generically criticise a huge number of people; I am just clearly describing my ideas, what I don't like and what will never tolerate. Note that I have always had a live-and-let-live kind of approach and that, other than for being a descriptive example to help explain my point, I don't care about that company, their expectations and how they get their money.