links (84)
Biology, Golang security, B-2 Windshields, Yelp Fanfiction, Irvine
This is because the little molecular machine that transcribes DNA into RNA has to actually ride along the helix, and it can only ride along some parts of it, namely the parts that aren’t curled up out of sight. “Expressing” a gene just means that at a given moment, the machine is accessing a specific portion of DNA, resulting in lots of RNA transcripts, resulting in lots of the protein that the gene codes for. Kink the fiber a bit and you change what the machine can see, thus changing the distribution of proteins it produces. You have “reprogrammed” the cell. (There are many ways to control gene expression, maybe the most common being “repressors” that park somewhere on the DNA, physically blocking the transcription machinery.)
Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers
type User struct {
Username string `json:"username,omitempty"`
Password string `json:"password,omitempty"`
IsAdmin bool
}
Is it evident that theIsAdminfield above would be unmarshaled? A less senior or distracted developer could assume it would not and introduce a security vulnerability.
A Man Bought All the Excess B-2 Spirit Windshields and Used Them to Build His Daughter a Treehouse
“He told me that over 20 years of service and thousands of hours of flying transcontinental missions, a B-2 has never needed a windshield replaced,” Edwards told The Aviation Geek Club. “The windshields were believed to be indestructible.”
Palo Alto with its fake downtown cannot match Irvine’s lack of a center, lack of pretension, lack of reference to any other urban agglomeration that ever existed: it has no relationship to Rome, Pompei, Xian, Chicago or even Los Angeles, which sprawled out of control and in waves of booms and busts.
CVS Pharmacy (3/5 Stars) Opening hours are completely made up. I drove by in the daytime and all its eyes were dark
Working on databases from prison
A brief summary is that I'm currently serving prison time for poor decisions and lifestyle choices I made in my twenties, all related to drugs. Three years ago, I enrolled in a prison college program that came with the unique opportunity to access a computer with limited internet access. This immediately reignited a teenage love for programming and a lightbulb immediately lit up: that this would be my way out of the mess I had gotten myself into over the past 15 years.
The lethal trifecta for AI agents
Access to your private data—one of the most common purposes of tools in the first place! Exposure to untrusted content—any mechanism by which text (or images) controlled by a malicious attacker could become available to your LLM The ability to externally communicate in a way that could be used to steal your data (I often call this “exfiltration” but I’m not confident that term is widely understood.) If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to that attacker.
*there are words*
A clear indicator that a doc might not be necessary are design docs that are really implementation manuals. If a doc basically says “This is how we are going to implement it” without going into trade-offs, alternatives, and explaining decision making (or if the solution is so obvious as to mean there were no trade-offs), then it would probably have been a better idea to write the actual program right away.
Design Docs at Google: HN Comment
One thing people don't get about Google is how it motivates its employees. You get promoted for taking credit for launching new stuff. I deliberately mention "taking credit", because if you can't take credit for the work you've done, you're better off not doing anything at all; a prime example of this is launching a project someone else started but abandoned. Note that you also don't need to do much work to be able to "take credit" - it's easier to just "lead" a project which is already on its way to getting launched by sitting in meetings with people more senior than you.
