Deebster

This is a great story, no downsides apart from maybe that the parrotfish have to find something else to eat.

I can almost believe that Australians do get their April Fools Day stuff that late.

First thing I did was check the date, but if it's a joke, it's nine days late.

Some frequently cited statistics—that cases of wrongly assigned paternity make up between ten and thirty per cent of all births—are misleading, since they are often based on data from tests requested by people who already have doubts about paternity. When the data are based on studies done for other reasons (for example, to look at inherited predispositions to conditions like cystic fibrosis), the rates of misattributed paternity come in at between one and 3.7 per cent.

That answered my question, quoted in case it answers others', too.

Interesting seeing how receiving money generated its own problems and work. They seem to be handling it well, though.

Thank you for the term - I thought it was something like amortised cost but when I looked that up it describes something completely different.

And are bugs harder to find than carefully hidden backdoors? No-one noticed the code being added and if it hadn't have had a performance penalty then it probably wouldn't have been discovered for a very long time, if ever.

The flip side to open-source is that bad actors could have reviewed the code, discovered Heartbleed and been quietly exploiting it without anyone knowing. Government agencies and criminal groups are known to horde zero-days.

I wonder if the compiler checks to see if the calls are pure and are therefore safe to run in parallel. It seems like the kind of thing the Rust compiler should be able to do.

I like this idea of thinking about purchases in terms of per-use cost - this means you should spend more on mattresses and bed linen, underwear, office chairs and computer peripherals, etc.

I'm also a fan of working out how much a price-tag is in terms of how long you need to work to get the equivalent cash. Would I be willing to work for an extra two hours to get this thing?

Maybe millions of potential eyes, but all of them are looking at other things! Heartbleed existed for two years before being noticed, and OpenSSL must have enormously more scrutiny than small projects like xz.

I am very pro open source and this investigation would've been virtually impossible on Windows or Mac, but the many-eyes argument always struck me as more theoretical/optimistic than realistic.

I have no idea for this at all, but I'm glad it exists.

Hmm, not really. It's only because it nerd-sniped someone who was trying to do something completely unrelated that this came to light. If that person has been less dedicated or less skilled we'd still probably be in the dark.