Hacker News Reader

Comment by daodedickinson | Hacker News Reader

As a young person new to computer science who was originally very curious about crypto, I can say that all the admonitions against "rolling your own" is intimidating people from entering the sector. When I'm shown a gigantic tome on the topic and then told even if I know it inside and out I better not build and use anything from it for real, I figure I may as well go in another direction where if I do anything worse than the best I'm not committing a heinous mistake.

So, compared to many sectors of computer science, much more patience and willingness to toil for years before creating anything of use is required.

View on HN

I think the proper elaboration to "Don't roll your own" is "Don't roll your own when it matters."

Attack the rolls of others and roll your own demo and ask for attacks.

The problem is crypto is far more important than the performance of a sort algorithm, or any other standard comp-sci algorithm.

And it's hard. I've been in this industry over 20 years, and been involved in a bunch of high-ish profile stuff, but I know that I don't have the knowledge to touch this stuff.

But in fairness it's a combination of understanding maths and understand some low level CPU stuff. If you are into that, just start learning it. Practice it. Someone has to follow on all this work. It could be you. But if it isn't, there's a ton of interesting stuff out there that isn't crypto. (Although I'd prefer everyone understood the basics of crypto, but that won't happen in my lifetime).

Yeah, it's really hard, and so I'm not smart enough to see what the author might be comparing crypto with. What's something equally hard, but has far less of a monoculture?

crypto is less CS than Applied Math . When I was graduated, there was no such thing as a CS degree - it was called Applied Math. But even then, most Applied Math didn't require very sophisticated math. Crypto does.

Agreed. People get the completely wrong idea simply because a computer is involved. It's the same as doing a black hole simulation - sure you have to code it up on a computer, but a CS student is not going to be able to do a full black hole simulation. You're going to need a physics phd, not even a physics student.

Same for crypto - you need a crypto phd for a fully secure novel crypto implementation, not a cs student.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com