I tend to think people shit on Musk more than they should, but holy shit does it bug me when a CEO talks about engineering problems with such bravado.

Only 8? Those are rookie numbers

Looks like lots of people’s year end bonuses were contingent on them releasing something related to AI by the end of the year.

JavaScript is a language that runs on a user’s computer, when they visit a web page. It is often used for dynamic functionality, ie when you click “like” on a comment… JavaScript running in your web browser will make a request to the server letting it know that you liked the post, then the server will respond with a total number of people who liked it or something.

But, the server needs to know how to authenticate which user liked the comment (so you can’t like it twice etc). There are various authentication mechanisms to do this, with their own trade-offs. Over all, there’s secret information that the browser and the server have to share with each other, and we don’t want that information being accessed by the wrong people.

There’s also a common problem with web apps called “cross site scripting”. Basically somebody might craft a cleverly formatted comment that exploits a bug in the web page and causes the attacker’s code to run. One trivial example might be if every time a person read a comment thread, the attackers code caused that person to “like” a request. A more serious exploit would be one that finds out that secret authentication information I mentioned and shares it with the attacker. They can then pose as the victim user and do anything they want as that person. This would be bad.

So, on to the different approaches and their tradeoffs.

• HttpOnly cookies. Basically when you log in, the server gives your browser a cookie vouching for who you are. Each subsequent request to the server will include this cookie automatically. The browser handles attaching it to the request, and the browser hides it from any JavaScript running on the page. One trade off is that it requires some authentication to happen between the user and the service (ie enter your username and password), to generate the cookie in the first place. This is likely what OP’s customers want to avoid.
• bearer tokens: basically, when JavaScript code makes a request to the server, it can optionally add some tokens in the request headers and use those to authenticate the user. I’m assuming OP’s scenario involves his company providing a service that is used by another company’s web site. They want to log in the user on their system, then forward some info along to OP’s system describing that user. They can’t just set an HttpOnly cookie for his domain, since it would be private to him; so instead they store a magic token in the browser’s local storage or somewhere and send that on every request. The down side is that JavaScript has to be able to read that token, so it enables that malicious user we talked about to steal it if they exploit some other bug.

Anyhow, one common solution here is to set very short expiration dates on those bearer tokens. That way if somebody steals it, they can’t use it for long.

Another strategy is to limit what each token can do. OP needs to make it so you can like a comment using one of those bearer tokens, but more dangerous actions like purchasing things, deleting content, etc, should be guarded by a more secure mechanism. Then the damage is mitigated if the bearer token leaks.

I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.

Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.

Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more

Only 20 tickets? Sounds pretty stable

This is one of the things I talk about when people ask what the difference is between junior and senior developers.

A lot of security is just box-checking. A lot of it is hypothetical and relies on attackers exploiting a chain of multiple bugs that they probably won’t ever find…. But you still gotta fix it.

There’s no point in being so proud of your code and dismissing security concerns because you’re arrogant enough to think it can’t happen to you. Just learn to fix it and move on with your life.

famously lack class consciousness

How much money do you suppose the average OpenAI employee makes? What class do you imagine they’re part of?

Social media is not to blame. The people using it are.

I use a “real name” domain. My last name ends in the letters “in”, so I bought a .in domain, such that the domain name is my last name with a dot in it.

Can’t honestly recommend that approach. It’s a cute gimmick, but when non-technical people ask for your email address and it doesn’t end in a TLD they recognize, their heads explode. I usually give out my gmail address.

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Didn’t Facebook try that for a while too?

“I could rewrite this in a week!”

~ junior dev, 3 months ago

Later on when I want to look productive I’ll delete all those printfs then pay myself on the back for committing a lot of code changes that sprint and for reducing our log storage costs by 75%

Value watching is just printf; change my mind

Is gmail still considered beta?

I appreciate the quick hack, but with a little more foresight you could have just put up a blurry jpeg with that number and changed the prompt so it looks like a CAPTCHA. Nobody would have given it a second thought.

Must be nice working at a place where that ticket doesn’t just get dropped into the dev backlog as-is.

My favorite pastime is arguing about which JavaScript runtime is faster while I wait for my app to finish running O(n^n) table scans of my database.