A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, "Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world."
The civil engineer interrupted, and said, "But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong: mine is the oldest profession in the world."
The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"

Note:
Ten points for an arbitrarily female Computer Scientist. ;)

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

"Typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters." - Steve Byers

Okay, this is a rather technical rant and I am sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.

So here it goes:

As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.

1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.

In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.

2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.

3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).

4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).

5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.

6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)

Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.

Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.

For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...

For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...

~Cheers~

(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )

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YouTube, why are you always showing me the same ad about an app I already own and use regularly? And why the FUCK do I you show me the new trailer of Star Wars Ep8 as an ad video before the actual video of the new Star Wars Ep8 trailer?

Audi, I am an university student, barely able to pay my rent, why are you telling me to buy your newest car? How do you expect me to afford this?

Monster, why exactly are you showing me job offers as "Technical Product Designer at company X" for which I'm not remotely qualified or even interested in?

Neither do I have 5000£ (I live in Germany, at least match the currency, ffs) to invest in some suspiciously promising stock market schemes, nor am I in any need of rheumatism pills or a hearing aid (I am 19). I cannot afford or want any Rolex watches and PLEASE, I don't know why you think I would, but I really do not need a special new and innovative brand of tampons, my dick is doing fine, thanks.

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